Via Middle East Eye

Egypt has been training Palestinian forces for months to take over the security administration of the Gaza Strip, as part of its plan for post-war reconstruction and governance of Gaza, security and diplomatic sources told Middle East Eye.

An agreement to train Palestinian forces in Egypt and Jordan has been in place since the first Palestinian Police Donors Conference in Oslo in December 1993. In April, Egyptian and Palestinian media reported that 300 Palestinian Authority security personnel were sent to Cairo: 100 police officers, 100 national security officers, 50 preventive security officers and 50 intelligence officers, as part of the Egyptian reconstruction plan. 

“All of these trainees are affiliated with the Fatah movement and loyal to the PA under Mahmoud Abbas,” an Egyptian security source told MEE. “Cairo avoided including individuals loyal to Palestinian leader Mohammed Dahlan so as not to provoke objections from the PA leadership in Ramallah, and to ensure the idea receives Saudi support,” the source added.

Another portion was trained in Jordan, but the numbers trained were not large, as both Cairo and Amman were hoping to obtain Gulf funding to continue the effort, the source said.

The 1993 Oslo conference was convened at the invitation of 14 donor countries, in addition to the European Union, the United States, the World Bank, the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Israel. Egypt and Jordan were the only two Arab countries to attend the conference, and a memorandum of understanding was signed to train thousands of Palestinian police officers, before the actual deployment of Palestinian police to Gaza and Jericho began in 1994. The number or batches of forces receiving this training were not announced.

Since the 1993 agreement, several of the PA’s forces have been sent to Cairo to attend security and military training courses at the Police Academy, the Military Academy and the Higher Military and Strategic Studies Academy (formerly the Nasser Higher Military Academy), which is a military academy in Egypt specialising in advanced military studies.

Reconstruction plan

Since the beginning of the Israeli assault on Gaza in October 2023, Egypt has been training young people from Gaza or who hail from the enclave, some residing and educated in Egypt, others who fled to Cairo after the war began, and others residing in the West Bank whose families originally come from the Gaza Strip, to carry out security administration, take on police duties and later govern the Gaza Strip, diplomatic and security sources told MEE.

This is part of the reconstruction plan proposed by Egypt during the Arab Summit in March. The plan aims to restore PA governance by working with Jordan to train Palestinian police for deployment in the strip, supported by political, financial and international backing, potentially involving other countries in rehabilitation efforts.

The plan also proposes that the UN Security Council consider deploying international protection or peacekeeping forces in both Gaza and the West Bank, within a broader framework and timetable for establishing a Palestinian state and building its institutional capacity.

A key challenge, according to the plan, would be the presence of multiple Palestinian armed groups, which the plan argues can only be resolved through a credible political process that addresses the root causes and restores rights to Palestinians.

The plan, however, has not received any approval or Gulf, particularly Saudi, support, an Egyptian diplomatic source told MEE. Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi had attempted to persuade Gulf states of the Egyptian reconstruction plan in a closed meeting held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, prior to the Arab Summit, the source said.

The plan, which Egypt proposed for what is known as “the day after the war ends”, was presented as an alternative to US President Donald Trump’s plan to displace Gaza’s residents to establish the “Gaza Riviera” resort. 

However, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates refused to provide any support or funding for the Egyptian plan, or for any alternative plan, before the war ends, conditioning such support on the disarmament of Hamas and the removal of its fighters from the Gaza Strip before engaging in any reconstruction process or transferring funds to Cairo, the diplomatic source added. 

Aly el-Raggal, a security analyst and researcher at the University of Florence in Italy, said that this plan serves many Egyptian interests, particularly Egypt’s security penetration into the Gaza Strip, something Cairo sees as a necessity.  “The deeper its security presence inside Gaza, the greater its political and social influence, and the greater its regional role,” he told MEE. “This is a necessary course of action at present, especially in light of the significant curtailment of Egypt’s role in all regional files.”

‘A vision for security’

However, Rajjal added, this security plan proposed by Egypt is impossible to implement under the current circumstances and with the presence of armed factions inside the strip.

“The condition for this plan to materialize is the end of the war and the end of Hamas and the rest of the resistance factions as well. This is not possible according to the current realities inside the Strip, especially in light of the decision by the Israeli Security Cabinet to occupy the Gaza Strip.”

Egypt’s Foreign Minister Badr Abdel Aaty had referred to the forces Cairo is training to govern the strip during the two-state solution conference held in New York last month.

Egypt has continued keeping its border with Gaza closed with massive razor wire & several layers of tall fencing…

Egypt continues to keep its border with Gaza closed with massive razor wire, multiple layers of border fence, large numbers of troops and armored vehicles. pic.twitter.com/2OwwOMwpk2

— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) March 21, 2024

“We have a vision for security arrangements and the governance of the Gaza Strip and who will manage the strip on the next day,” he said. “Egypt is training hundreds of Palestinians to take over security tasks in Gaza.”

Abdel Aaty added that Cairo continues to provide security training programs for PA forces, to enable them to enforce the law in Gaza and the West Bank. 

“This would help create a suitable climate for the establishment of a contiguous Palestinian state, to support the capabilities of the Palestinian Authority so that it can perform its role in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in preparation for launching the political negotiation process.”

On 29 July, Egypt joined Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and the Arab League in endorsing the New York Declaration on a two-state solution, which calls on Hamas to relinquish control of Gaza and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority.

According to Egyptian security sources, Cairo had initially resisted linking disarmament to ceasefire negotiations. However, under sustained pressure from the UAE and Saudi Arabia, Egypt shifted its stance, aligning itself with regional efforts to initiate what has been described as a “surrender process”, the sources told MEE last week. This position aligns with Israeli preconditions, backed by Washington, for ending the war on Gaza.

Maja Wallengren, Danish-born independent coffee market reporter and founder of SpillingTheBean, reports that severe frost has struck key coffee-producing areas in Brazil, including the entire Cerrado Mineiro region and parts of Southern Minas. 

Wallengren warned that this “frost damage” event could be the “death blow” to the 2026 harvest, with production estimates now around 54 to 58 million bags versus prior estimates near 70% of capacity. 

Given Brazil’s position as the world’s largest coffee producer, adverse weather conditions represent a potentially bullish catalyst for coffee futures in New York and warrant close market monitoring.

Brazil @coffee lands across Minas Gerais including all top regions from Southern Minas to Alta Mogiana and the Cerrado already have been hammered by three intense cold fronts this year, and as I have tried to explain here MANY times even if the physical damage has not been… https://t.co/qkO4K4tu0e pic.twitter.com/sKZe8z9m81

— Maja Wallengren (@SpillingTheBean) August 9, 2025

Some talk again about #frost to Brazil #Coffee . However, in my 40 years of experience in this business, only twice in 100 years has there been a frost this late in August that caused crop damage & Coffee grown further north. High pressure (1024 MB) needs to be closer to Minas… pic.twitter.com/93M3642GuI

— WeatherWealth Commodity Newsletter (@ClimatePredict) August 10, 2025

Here’s the report from Wallengren, which was first published on X: 

BREAKING #KC BRAZIL FROST DAMAGE continues to be confirmed across ALL of Cerrado Mineiro #coffee region, and also across MANY municipalities in Southern Minas and parts of SP/AM, and REPEATING as @SpillingTheBean has said MANY TIMES over the last month, even if the physical and visible damage to coffee trees, farms and regions may appear to be less right now than the July-2021 frosts four years ago, the STRESS IMPACT on trees and farms ahead of the 2026 flowering is MASSIVELY more severe now than four years ago, as most Brazilian coffee growers have NOT YET RECOVERED from the last 5 years of non-stop weather disasters, and the ENTIRE BRAZIL arabica coffee park is SEVERELY weakened and fragile compared to 4 years ago, hence the 2026 harvest was already SEVERELY compromised to a max crop potential of 70% BEFORE the latest and ongoing COLD FRONT and FROST started to move across the main MG coffee belt and this current frost development is THE DEATH BLOW to the 2026 harvest which in VERY BEST case scenario at this point will be able to produce a MAX of 54M-58M bags !!

*BREAKING #KC BRAZIL FROST DAMAGE continues to be confirmed across ALL of Cerrado Mineiro #coffee region, and also across MANY municipalities in Southern Minas and parts of SP/AM, and REPEATING as @SpillingTheBean has said MANY TIMES over the last month, even if the physical and… https://t.co/qsdgPNBqgi pic.twitter.com/bAwtmtawH6

— Maja Wallengren (@SpillingTheBean) August 12, 2025

The Cerrado Mineiro region is a major coffee-growing area in Brazil, but its contribution to global coffee output is relatively small. 

Here’s how it breaks down:

• The Cerrado Mineiro region produces about 5 million bags of coffee annually.

• Brazil, as a country, supplies around 35 to 40% of the world’s coffee.

• Brazil’s total output is around 64 million bags (based on around 37% share of about 60 million bags of global production).

• So, Cerrado Mineiro probably accounts for about 7 to 8% of Brazil’s coffee, which corresponds to roughly 2 to 3% of global coffee production.

Commenters on Wallengren’s post expressed surprise that coffee futures showed little reaction to the news. September arabica coffee in New York traded flat.

Will it take a few days for coffee desks to digest the problem?

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

New figures show that women from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq living in Austria have an average birth rate almost three times higher than that of Austrian-born women, according to data from the country’s Statistical Yearbook on Migration and Integration.

The report finds that Austrian-born women have an average of 1.22 children. Among women not born in Austria, the figure rises to 1.57. However, the figure among some countries of origin rises significantly.

Those born in the former Yugoslavia average 1.94 children, while Turkish-born women have 1.8 children. The highest rates are found among Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi women, who average 3.3 children each.

🇦🇹🤰 Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi refugees living in Austria are having almost three times as many children as Austrian-born women, according to data from the country’s Statistical Yearbook on Migration and Integration. pic.twitter.com/excbpff5Hl

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) August 11, 2025

The report notes that Austrian mothers tend to be older when giving birth, with an average age of 30.4 years for Austrian-born women compared to 28.7 years for non-Austrian-born women. Women from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq have their first child at an average age of 26.2 years.

These figures come amid ongoing debate in Austria about the demographic impact of migration since the large influx of refugees from Syria in recent years.

At CPAC Hungary in May, the leader of the Austrian Freedom Party, Herbert Kickl, claimed that mass immigration to Europe is an agenda that is organized as “a consciously controlled ethnic and cultural transformation.”

Austria’s FPÖ leader @Herbert_Kickl at #CPACHungary2025:

“What is happening in Europe is no coincidence. It is the result of an agenda, a consciously controlled ethnic and cultural transformation. Migration is not being stopped, it is being organized, promoted, and glorified.” pic.twitter.com/RHbYaMn1oG

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) May 29, 2025

“What is happening in Europe is no coincidence. It is the result of an agenda, a consciously controlled ethnic and cultural transformation. Because migration is not being stopped, no, it is being organized, promoted, and glorified,” he told attendees.

A new generation with a growing Muslim population is having a profound effect in Austria, particularly in education. In October 2024, federal data revealed that more than three-quarters of students in Vienna’s middle schools do not speak German at home, putting pressure on an education system designed for single-language learning.

A survey at the same time by the local teachers’ union at some of Vienna’s 100 compulsory schools revealed not only systematic issues like language barriers, but also extreme incidents, including assaults on teachers, situations where parents of schoolchildren asked a teacher to wear a burqa, and even the presence of mock executions.

It has led to teachers leaving their profession — 20 a day on average in 2024 — and other educators speaking out on the “rapid Islamization” of the Austrian capital.

“Islam is changing our society in ways we do not want,” said longtime principal of a Vienna middle school, Christian Klar, in an interview with Christian magazine Corrigenda last year.

A December 2024 report from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution also unveiled disturbing trends in the Islamist radicalization of young girls in Upper Austria.

To mitigate the strain that mass immigration is having on schools, Education Minister Christoph Wiederkehr announced in March orientation classes designed to prepare migrant children for the Austrian school environment.

He noted how many of these students not only do not speak any German but are also unfamiliar with basic literacy and numeracy. Some have never held a pen or followed structured school rules, and many fail to show respect for female teachers due to cultural differences.

Read more here…

Authored by Michael Zhuang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

In the span of just four months, four prominent Chinese entrepreneurs from multiple industries have committed suicide, all reportedly jumping from buildings in desperate final acts. Experts say that these incidents stand in stark contrast to the Chinese regime’s official narrative of “better-than-expected” GDP growth for the first half of the year.

On April 16, Bi Guangjun, founder of Jindianzi Textiles Ltd, leapt from the 28th floor of a building. Insiders revealed that he invested heavily in China’s new energy industry but lost a fortune.

On June 2, Liu Wenchao, chairman of Xizi Elevator Co. Ltd., a firm heavily reliant on China’s now-floundering property sector, died after falling from a building. Chinese state-controlled media said that Liu once said that anyone who has ambition ends up scarred.

On July 17, Zeng Yuzhou, founder of home renovation chain Liangjiaju Building Materials, jumped from a high-rise in Guangzhou. He left behind a 1 billion yuan ($140 million) mess, affecting over 2,000 families, more than 1,000 employees, and over 300 suppliers, according to Chinese media.

Just 10 days later, on July 27, Chinese media reported that the chairman of home retail giant Easyhome New Retail Group, Wang Linpeng, died after jumping off a building, only four days after being released from police custody. Wang had been held by authorities during an anti-corruption investigation.

A System Under Strain

Xiao Yi, a London-based Chinese finance professional with 30 years of experience in the industry and a China watcher, shared his analysis of the four deaths with the Chinese edition of The Epoch Times, where he is a regular contributor. Although the deaths occurred in different sectors, Xiao said he believes that it reveals common underlying pressures strangling China’s private sector, which includes collapsing cash flows, mounting debt, policy uncertainty, and the erosion of public trust.

He noted that China’s ballooning local government debt has crowded out private-sector financing. While state media champion slogans like “supporting the real economy,” capital is disproportionately funneled to state-owned enterprises (SOEs), leaving private firms informally blacklisted from loans.

Chinese banks, being fearful of defaults, are tightening credit, according to Xiao. After Bi’s firm suffered massive losses, his bank slashed lending instead of offering support. Liangjiaju’s last 5 million yuan ($685,000) in reserve funds were directly seized by its bank, pushing the company into collapse.

Economic Decline and Arbitrary Regulations

Since 2021, China’s property market has been in freefall, with demand for new and second-hand homes shrinking sharply. Xiao said that this has devastated related sectors—from elevators and interior decoration to appliances and building materials. Liangjiaju’s customer payment cycles stretched from two weeks to six months. Xizi Elevator’s revenue disappeared as developers defaulted.

Xiao pointed out that China’s exports have deteriorated due to U.S. tariffs and a surge in manufacturing in Southeast Asia. Bi’s textile firm saw orders drop by 40 percent and payment terms double. The cumulative effect of these sector-wide declines has ensnared supply chains and suffocated cash flows.

Entrepreneurs in China, Xiao said, are operating in an environment of overregulation and unpredictable policy shifts. Harsh environmental fines, frozen accounts, and arbitrary audits can cripple companies overnight.

More alarming is the anti-corruption watchdog’s power to detain individuals without legal oversight, Xiao said, pointing out that Wang was reportedly held incommunicado, with no legal representation—a process designed to extract confessions and map “interest networks,” effectively turning suspects into pawns in political purges.

Broken Trust and Systematic Injustice

According to Xiao, many of the companies that collapsed operated on trust-dependent models with prepayments, chain financing, and personal guarantees. When that trust evaporates, the system implodes. In the case of Liangjiaju Building Materials, its customers demanded refunds, suppliers protested, and employees fled.

He said that, unlike in the United States or Europe, Chinese law lacks meaningful bankruptcy protection for private businesses. Most reorganization cases are rejected by courts, particularly for asset-light firms. Once a firm collapses, the founder’s personal and financial freedoms vanish. They’re blacklisted, surveilled, and ostracized, with no option for a second chance. Many see suicide as the only “honorable” way to resolve unpayable debt, Xiao said.

Each entrepreneur’s suicide was censored from trending on Chinese social media for at least 24 hours, showing the regime’s tight control over public narratives.

Xiao observed online discourse in China, and Zeng’s death was seen as the failure of “doing business with integrity.” Despite his efforts to complete pending projects, he was overwhelmed by creditors. His story illustrates how easily trust can be weaponized in today’s China and how quickly a person’s reputation can collapse, Xiao said.

In Wang’s case, the public speculated that he may have disclosed sensitive information about collusion between local officials and business figures during his detention. China’s opaque justice system is often marked by the lack of legal counsel, secret detention, and forced confessions. Wang’s high-profile fall has become a cautionary tale of what happens when business collides with political danger, according to Xiao.

​​A Crisis of Confidence

Xiao believes that the deaths of Bi, Liu, Zeng, and Wang are not isolated tragedies. They represent the mounting pressure bearing down on China’s private entrepreneurs who are caught between shrinking markets, policy unpredictability, financial exclusion, and a collapsing social contract, he said.

In today’s China, the greater crisis may not be an economic slowdown, but the collapse of faith in the system itself, according to Xiao.

Xiao Yi contributed to this report. 

Building on UBS’ note to clients last month, which flagged an inflection point as streaming TV recently overtook traditional TV, a new report from Goldman, citing its very own Nielsen TV ratings tracker, shows a continued steep deterioration in broadcast and cable viewership in recent weeks. 

A team of Goldman analysts led by Michael Ng opened Monday’s note to clients with a disturbing statistic for the traditional TV industry: 

We refresh our Nielsen TV ratings tracker for our U.S. Media coverage (DIS, CMCSA, PARA, WBD, FOXA) that includes traditional ACM (average commercial minute) prime time and total day ratings across broadcast and cable. This edition focuses on the C3 cable and broadcast ratings through week ending July 27th, 2025 (14 day delay), and L3 cable ratings through week ending August 10th, 2025.

• Prime time commercial ratings for broadcast ex-sports were down 23% yoy in 3Q25-to-date (through week ending July 27th).

• Prime time commercial ratings decreased 39% for broadcast including sports and declined -30% for cable, in 3Q25-to-date (through week ending July 27th).

Some of the key takeaways from Ng’s note are that audience erosion is accelerating in both broadcast and cable compared with earlier in 2025, with even the stabilizing effect of sports unable to offset sharp primetime declines. FOX stands out as a notable exception, as strong growth at Fox News bucks the broader downturn in cable. 

In contrast, Comcast (CMCSA) is facing the most severe collapse in cable total day viewership, plunging 49% year-over-year. Overall, the weakness in viewership is broad-based across entertainment, news, and lifestyle genres.

CMCSA viewership declined the most QTD at -49% y/y C3Q25-to-date

Broadcast primetime ratings (including sports) by broadcast network

For the full report on the traditional TV viewership tracker, read the full report in the usual place. 

Ng’s report builds on the UBS note we cited in early July about the inflection point reached: “Streaming surpasses traditional TV in May.”

And perhaps the downturn in traditional TV is why mega broadcaster Sinclair, with 178 stations across 81 U.S. markets, announced earlier today a “strategic review of its broadcast business” aimed at “optimizing value creation across its portfolio.” 

Authored by Gareth Jenkins via CoinTelegraph.com,

Ethereum went live 10 years ago, bringing programmability and composability to a technological innovation sparked by the advent of Bitcoin in 2009.

But what does the future of Ethereum hold? It’s a loaded question that is incredibly difficult to answer given the complexity and decentralized nature of the world’s pioneering smart-contract blockchain protocol.

Cointelegraph recently traveled to EthCC in Cannes to speak to the brightest minds in the Ethereum community about its current state and the future of the protocol amid the rise of highly competitive next-generation layer-1 blockchains.

These conversations formed the backbone of Cointelegraph’s latest mini-documentary: “The Fight for Ethereum’s Soul.”

The documentary features several founders, CEOs and builders in the Ethereum ecosystem including Ethereum Foundation (EF) co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, Ethereum France president Jerome de Tychey, Figment co-founder and CEO Lorien Gabel, Dune Analytics co-founder and CEO Fredrik Haga, Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron, YAP Global co-founder and CEO Samantha Yap and Base head of product Tom Vieira.

The documentary was directed and produced by Cointelegraph’s head of multimedia Gareth Jenkinson, with senior producer Celine Tan.

A decade of dominance under threat

Ethereum has dramatically evolved over the past decade. The blockchain managed to execute a change in consensus algorithm, often likened to replacing the engine of a car driving at full speed on a highway.

The shift from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake fundamentally changed the way the protocol works. Ethereum parted ways with Bitcoin’s proof-of-work approach to consensus, rooted in computationally and energy-intensive hashing, to a skin-in-the-game system that requires validators to stake ETH tokens to maintain the network and reap rewards.

While Ethereum initially provided fantastic functionality, it eventually encountered the same problems as the preeminent cryptocurrency protocol. Its base layer chain simply could not serve the needs of the growing number of users, applications and services that set up on its network.

Source: Ethereum.org

To enable the ability to process infinitely scalable transactions, the Ethereum community adopted a layer 2-centric approach to scaling. Execution, from transactions or asset creation, was shifted to a separate infrastructure layer. These layers use incredible advances in cryptography, like ZK-proofs, to submit trustless evidence of transactions and activity to Ethereum’s base layer.

This brought scale, speed and cost reductions to layer 1, but an inevitable consequence was the fragmentation of liquidity and shifting incentives for validators. Fees dropped on the base layer, which remains a core incentive for Ethereum validators to maintain the network.

Meanwhile, the superior execution environments of layer 2s began to pull liquidity from Ethereum’s base layer. In 2024, grumblings of discontent began to surface.

Prominent voices called for the EF to intervene and propose changes to the protocol that ensured the value of ETH continues to rise while maintaining the advances in UX and UI that layer 2s had provided.

Changing of the guard

In 2025, the EF made significant changes to its organisational structure. Tomasz Stańczak and Hsiao-Wei Wang took up a dual role at the top of the Foundation, reporting to a braintrust led by Vitalik Buterin.

Pectra, Ethereum’s latest network upgrade, hit the mainnet in May. It was the most significant change to the protocol since the Merge in 2022.

Combining the Prague execution layer and Electra consensus layer hard forks, Pectra introduced 11 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) to improve scalability, user experience and staking efficiency.

Source: Ethereum.org

Pectra builds improvements made by the 2024 Dencun upgrade, which famously introduced Blobs through EIP 4844, known as proto-danksharding.

Blobs provided a new way for L2s to post transaction data on the L1. The impact was dramatic; L2 transaction fees dropped by 90%.

An unavoidable consequence of this upgrade was that L2s no longer paid huge fees to settle on Ethereum. According to Dune co-founder Fredrik Haga, this was a technological boon, but an economic drawback for L1 validators.

“The L2 situation is interesting because now 85% of transactions are on L2, so there’s only 15% left on Ethereum L1, but 85% of the volume still lives on L1,” Haga said. “The L1 has very limited engagement, if you will, in like the absolute number. But the big money is still clearly on L1. Then obviously the L2 used to pay a lot to settle to L1. And since blobs were introduced in March 2024, that has basically gone to zero.”

Source: Hildobby/Dune Analytics.

The combined impact of Dencun in 2024 and Pectra in 2025 has helped the Ethereum ecosystem move further down an intricate development roadmap. Stańczak said unifying liquidity, interoperability and improving overall user experience has been a top priority for the Ethereum Foundation (EF) over the past 18 months.

“I think the big focus now is on the interop, on the tooling and the standards, and accelerating that idea that all the chains around Ethereum should feel very much like a single ecosystem, and it should be very natural for the users to transfer between them to use all the applications that just flow to different chains if they need to,” Stańczak said.

“There are clear challenges on presenting how the fee structure, data availability and interop mechanics all work together. Just a few years ago, it was really hard to predict how the L2s would evolve. Now we see we have much more clarity.”

Jerome de Tychey, the head of Ethereum France and organizer of EthCC, added that the future success of the protocol is a balancing act between prioritizing L1 mechanics and the symbiosis with L2s.

“We are doing two things right now. First, we are putting some emphasis on the L1, on scalability and on the sustainability of the L2. We have a lot of consideration about the future performance of the security aspect of things, and also of potentially the token itself, of course, but also upgrading how the user experience is going to be unfolded in the next years. That’s a very, very good signal that Ethereum is going to be more accessible from a usability standpoint,” De Tychey said.

Still, the balancing act remains a precarious one. How does the Ethereum L1 ensure that validators are incentivized to keep the network running and avoid getting into a performance arm-wrestle with new-age layer 1s like Solana, SUI and Aptos?

Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron offered food for thought, suggesting that any efforts to try to compete directly with Solana, SUI or Aptos might be to the detriment of Ethereum’s future.

“I’m pretty optimistic about it in the sense that it does look like they’re saying, like, OK, maybe let’s focus on data availability and execution more than personally I would like, but without really giving up this benefit that we have from a settlement perspective,” Boiron said.

“I think it is dangerous, right? If they go down this road of trying to compete on execution too heavily, the likelihood is they will end up getting out-competed by those who are trying to do the exact same thing.”

The next decade

While the volume of criticism was deafeningly loud over the past year, conversations at EthCC gave a sense of optimism about the future of Ethereum.

This optimism is not rooted in fervour but rather in utility and onchain metrics. More than 90% of tokenized real-world assets are being built on Ethereum.

BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, is tokenizing securities on Ethereum.

Robinhood grabbed headlines in Cannes with the launch of its own Ethereum-based layer 2, squarely aimed at RWA and securities tokenization.

“If you think about DeFi versus TradFi, I would say absolutely no chance that DeFi will not dominate all the global markets. It will be there. It will happen on Ethereum,” Stańczak said.

De Tychey said there’s no meaningful alternative. “Everything else is a ghost train and going in the wrong direction, and pushing and lobbying to still be able to exist with a lot of different interests, a lot of vested interests.”

Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal summed things up succinctly:

“Ethereum got dragged into the execution game. Whereas Ethereum’s core value proposition is this highly decentralized, sovereign-resistant, permissionless settlement layer. And if Ethereum plays well to its strengths and focuses on being the best settlement layer, we already have enough network effects and the momentum for the whole Web3 world to be created around Ethereum.”

The Farmer’s Almanac has issued its long-range forecast for the upcoming Western Hemispheric winter, calling for cold and snowy conditions across large swaths of the Lower 48. While the two-century-old publication touts an 80% accuracy rate, independent analysis places that figure around 55%. 

The forecast, which dates back to 1818 and accounts for environmental fluctuations on Earth, solar activity (sunspots), the motion of the Moon, and other proprietary factors, calls for “widespread wintry weather” in the 2025–26 winter season.

Here’s a breakdown of the forecast:

Cold Zones:

• Coldest: Northern Plains to New England, plus Northwest (Idaho, Washington).

• Major cold snaps expected mid-January and mid-February.

Snow Outlook:

• New England: Frequent snowstorms.

• Atlantic Coast: Significant rain, occasional snow mix.

• Mid-Atlantic Mountains: Decent snow events.

• Great Lakes, Ohio Valley, North Central: Classic snow-heavy winter.

• Pacific Northwest Mountains: Impressive snow totals.

Regional Highlights:

• Southeast: Average temps, wet;

• Appalachians see occasional snow.

• Texas/Southern Plains: Wetter than average, periodic cold snaps, limited snow but freezing rain possible.

• Southwest: Wet winter, near-average temps. 

If the Farmer’s Almanac’s long-range forecast is even partially accurate,  it could spell serious trouble for Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern states already plagued with strained power grids, with Maryland at the epicenter of the crisis.

Authored by Parker Thayer via CapitalResearch.org,

George Soros turns 95 today, and for his birthday present America brought him the annihilation of his legacy.

Soros has been known for two things: making money and spending it on political influence. Over the last few years, he has handed over control of his empire to his son, Alex, and Alex seems unable to do either of those things successfully.

The money

First, Alex ruined his reputation for making money. George was once known as “the man who broke the bank of England,” famous for making $1 billion in one day by sniffing out arbitrage opportunities in currency exchange markets.

Taking control of Soros Fund Management, Alex became the man who broke the bank of Soros. In December 2021, Alex invested $2 billion to buy nearly 20 million shares of an electric vehicle company called Rivian at somewhere between $70 and $100 per share. It was one of the largest one-off investments the fund had ever made.

A year later, Rivan shares were selling for just $18 and Soros Fund Management sold at a loss of what must have been more than $1 billion. HedgeFollow, a website that tracks and ranks U.S. hedge fund performances, currently gives Soros Fund Management a performance rating of 1 out of 5 stars, making it one of the least successful in the country.

The politics

Alex is as talented at making billions vanish as George was at making them appear, but maybe he inherited some of his dad’s skill for political maneuvering and network building?

Well, no, not really.

Alex has become famous for posting photos of himself posing with Democratic politicians and liberal world leaders, but the actual influence of the George’s network seems to have been greatly diminished. Perhaps related to the massive losses on Rivian, in July 2023 Open Society Foundations announced that it would be laying off 40 percent of its staff worldwide, halting all new grants until February 2024, and completely changing its operating model. What had once been an international network of influence peddling was slashed to the bone.

The crowning achievement of the Open Society Network under Alex so far was the passage of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Open Society staffers, such as Tom Perriello, were so involved in pushing the legislation that Open Society Policy Center briefly re-opened lobbying operations and became one of the top lobbying spenders in the nation. Perriello was on the floor of the House when the bill was passed. (Capital Research Center has written at length on Soros’ involvement in the IRA. The research can be found here.)

Billions of dollars for EV chargers (that never got built) and billions more for EV tax credits were crammed into to the bill, seemingly the perfect bandage for Rivian’s revenue troubles. The IRA even allocated $3 billion for purchasing electric delivery trucks for the postal service, and Rivian is one of the biggest producers of electric delivery vans. But, despite the EV subsidies and green energy handouts, the bill came too little and too late to save Soros’ investment in Rivian.

This period coincided with another of Alex’s big political maneuvers: Spending at least $4 million on Stacey Abrams’s failed gubernatorial campaign in Georgia. During that time, Rivian was starting to build a “giga-factory” outside of Atlanta and, most importantly, asking the state government for subsidies. In the eleventh hour of the Biden administration, Rivian was also awarded $6.5 billion loan for the factory from the Department of Energy. Construction on the factory has yet to even start, and Rivian stock currently trades at less than $12 per share.

The decline and fall of the Soros DA’s

George’s most notable political achievement, one so famous that his name was used to coin the term for it, was the funding of the “Soros DAs.”

One of George’s goals for decades has been to end of the War on Drugs and implement a total overhaul of the American criminal justice system. To that end, he has funded soft-on-crime think tanks and pro-legalization ballot initiatives.

And then, in a showcase of the financial genius that made him a billionaire, George spotted a political arbitrage opportunity. He realized his immense fortune could make an outsized impact if he supported soft-on-crime politicians running to become local prosecutors and district attorneys.

A lot of them won. And then, “Soros DA” became a political lightning rod as soaring murder and violent crime rates followed behind George’s donations.

Coupled with the “reforms” and defunding of the police that were popularized during the summer of 2020, the Soros DA became a nationwide blight on urban areas. While left-leaning pundits, researchers, and think tanks, frequently funded by Soros, tried to explain away the spike in crime and blame it on the pandemic, guns, or economic hardship, Americans grew more discontented with the “reform” they had been promised.

Today, more than a dozen Soros DA’s have been removed from office by recalls, scandals, or simply not seeking re-election. And the spike in urban crime ended up being a key factor for the Democratic Party’s defeat in 2024.

The demise of the Soros DA is more than a rejection of Soros’ legacy on criminal justice policy. It was also a rejection of his legacy on immigration. As one might guess from a name like “Open Society,” Soros is a proponent of open borders. One reason Soros began funding DAs in 2016 was to create “sanctuary cities” that would be the heart of the so-called “resistance.”

The second election of Donald Trump—in a race where crime, immigration, and the IRA were three of the major issues—was America’s personal slap to George Soros’ face. Today, on his 95th birthday, his legacy is in shambles.

Happy Birthday, George!

A federal court began hearing testimony on Aug. 11 in a trial to determine whether President Donald Trump illegally used National Guard troops for law enforcement in California.

The trial is part of a broader legal debate over the federal government’s power in combating lawlessness in the country.

On the day the trial started, Trump said he would activate National Guard troops to combat crime in Washington.

Sam Dorman reports for The Epoch Times that U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, who is overseeing the trial, previously blocked Trump’s use of National Guard troops, but an appeals court halted that decision.

Breyer’s decision had focused on whether Trump violated a federal law that directs the president to issue orders through a state’s governor.

This trial is focused on whether Trump violated a law, known as the Posse Comitatus Act, by using federal troops for civilian law enforcement.

The trial is expected to last three days with multiple witnesses. The state of California brought three witnesses on Aug. 11, including Maj. Gen. Scott Sherman, who led the troops in the state.

His testimony, and another by Enforcement and Removal Operations Field Office Director Ernesto Santacruz Jr., probed the relationship between federal law enforcement and the activities of military troops called into California.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who initially sued the administration in June, is alleging that the Trump administration violated the Posse Comitatus Act by using troops for direct involvement in civilian law enforcement activities, such as forming blockades and detaining civilians.

Last week, the Justice Department argued that the trial should be canceled.

Among other things, it argued that the federalized National Guard troops were not executing the laws but were instead focused on the protection of federal property and personnel performing federal functions.

Besides, it said, another section of federal law allows the National Guard to execute the law.

It was referring to Section 12406 of federal law, which allows the president to federalize the National Guard under certain conditions, including if he “is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”

That was the law that Breyer previously said the president violated.

According to testimony from Sherman, troops were conducting multiple requests for assistance as of the night of Aug. 10.

The Department of Defense said on June 11 that it was deploying more than 4,000 troops, including Marines and members of the National Guard.

By Aug. 5, the Justice Department told Breyer that less than 10 percent of the originally deployed force—or about 300 Guardsmen—remained.

During Sherman’s testimony, an attorney for California played a portion of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s speech that morning about plans for mobilizing the National Guard in Washington.

In the nation’s capital, Trump is calling up hundreds of National Guard troops and has invoked a law that puts the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington under his control for 48 hours.

House Judiciary Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) accused Trump of a “phony, manufactured crisis” and said he would introduce a resolution to “restore full home rule powers to the Mayor, Council, and people of the District of Columbia.”

Authored by Beige Luciano-Adams via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

LOS ANGELES—When students in Jamie Rector’s Energy and Civilization course at the University of California–Berkeley came to him with the idea for a project on California’s abandoned oil wells, he was intrigued.

The state has more than 120,000 abandoned oil and gas wells, as well as 30,000 idle wells and 70,000 active wells. Many were drilled or dug in the late 1800s, clustered in areas such as downtown Los Angeles and near present-day Dodger Stadium, where the California oil boom began.

The concern among some is that these wells might be emitting methane or other hydrocarbons. Older ones are likely to have been improperly or shallowly sealed.

The federal government has spent $4.7 billion to plug and reclaim abandoned wells. California has plugged about 1,400 wells at a cost of $29.5 million since 1977, and now requires operators to eliminate idle wells or face increasing fees.

As they researched California’s abandoned oil wells, Rector’s students discovered an abundance of natural oil seeps located above the same fields—and came to a surprising conclusion. According to them, geologically driven, natural oil seeps are a major contributor to California’s greenhouse gas emissions. And drilling—long seen as the problem, not the answer—might be a panacea for emissions.

Natural seeps occur when liquid oil and gas leak to the Earth’s surface, both on land and under water. California sits on actively moving tectonic plates, which create fractured reservoirs and pathways for the oil to escape.

Waters off Southern California are rife with seeps, and oil and gas fields, including the Salt Lake field beneath the La Brea Tar Pits, and the Coal Oil Point field off the coast of Goleta, have some of the highest natural hydrocarbon seep rates in the world, emitting gases such as methane, as well as toxic volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

But these geologically driven seeps, Rector said, have been largely unaccounted for in assessing how oil production fields contribute to California’s greenhouse gas emissions.

“There are hundreds of studies linking oil and gas fields to greenhouse gas emissions, to cancer rates, to climate justice, to groundwater pollution and everything else,” said Rector, a professor in the University of California–Berkeley’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. “And yet none of these studies ever considered the possibility that it wasn’t from equipment or production, but natural seeps above the oil fields.”

Reviewing existing literature, Rector’s team calculated that natural seeps, together with orphaned wells, produce 50 times more methane emissions than oil and gas equipment leaks in Southern California.

If seeps are driving emissions above oil fields, Rector said, then plugging abandoned wells may do little to help pollution.

In fact, he said, the only demonstrated way to reduce natural seep emissions is by depleting underlying reservoirs—that is, by drilling.

Pointing to studies showing that oil production has reduced and even eliminated seeps, he suggested that California’s current regulatory environment may be counterproductive.

“The crazy thing is, by stopping oil and gas production in California, after we’ve regulated and really gotten equipment emissions way down, we may be increasing seep emissions,” Rector said. “Because these seeps come up through the oil and gas fields, and the only way to stop it is by producing oil.”

Ira Leifer, a researcher in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of California–Santa Barbara, said the argument is valid but that Rector’s analysis gets ahead of available data.

“The problem is that there is no statewide seep emissions estimate,” said Leifer, who studies marine seeps and oil field emissions. Arriving at a publishable estimate is “impossibly difficult,” he said.

Rector characterized the student project as a “skunkworks” effort without any funding, which he said he planned to submit for peer-review by August. Ideally, it will be followed by field research.

“We will have to go out and make measurements with the hypothesis that seeps are the principal cause rather than oil field equipment, and make measurements along traces of faults, above oil fields where faults intersect the surface,“ he said. ”That’s really the only way we’ll get to the bottom of this.”

Meanwhile, Leifer is working on his own forthcoming paper analyzing satellite data of methane anomalies. The strongest ones, he said, are associated with refining and other large infrastructure, and with natural faults that have been punctured by man-made wells—something he calls “anthropogenically amplified seepage.”

Of Rector’s paper, he said: “I fundamentally agree with their conclusion. I just don’t think it can be supported with data at this point.”

Leifer acknowledged that petroleum-related hydrocarbon emissions, including a “poorly understood” geological component, “clearly are extremely significant to overall California methane budget emissions,” based on spatial patterns from satellite data he has been studying for years.

Both Leifer and Rector agree that so far, emissions from orphaned wells and natural seeps have not been differentiated. Thus, the critical question remains unanswered: How much does natural seepage contribute to overall emissions?

While California has some of the highest concentrations of recoverable oil and gas in the world, it also boasts the most stringent oil and gas regulations in the country, and production has been in steady decline as the state aims for a 2045 “decarbonization” goal.

“If we’re really worried about emissions, pollution, disadvantaged communities, health—even fire danger, earthquakes and public safety—this is all affected by seeps,” Rector said.

By relying on studies that have broadly ignored them, he said, policymakers may have unknowingly implemented counterproductive policies.

Ancient Rocks, Modern Problems

Los Angeles sits atop one of the most petroleum-dense basins on the planet. Rector cited a 2015 U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) study estimating that there are still 1 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the Los Angeles Basin. This year, the USGS estimated that 61 million barrels of recoverable oil and 240 billion cubic feet of gas remain.

The organic-rich sediment beneath us is oil-prone and “relatively immature,” Rector said, and hydrocarbon generation is ongoing. Massive natural seeps such as Coal Oil Point off the coast of Santa Barbara, California—one of the largest seep fields in the world—continue to actively produce petroleum.

Seeps concentrated along the coast are fed by adjacent reservoirs deep within sedimentary rock beneath the region’s oil and gas fields.

California’s geology is also uniquely affected by actively shifting tectonics. Along with organic-laden sediment deposits, the shifting plates create conditions for rich petroleum accumulations, as well as natural seepage and hydrocarbon venting, Rector said.

Oil fields both in the Los Angeles Basin and throughout Southern California, he said, tend to concentrate along fault lines, allowing oil generated down deep to migrate into shallower pools and eventually make its way to the surface.

The La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles is one of the largest seepage sites in the state, and hydrocarbon gas emissions there are the highest on record for any onshore seepage site in the United States, according to a 2017 research article published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

California’s bubbling tar pits have been part of human culture for millennia, their bitumen used by the Chumash Tribe as a sealant long before anyone showed up to drill for oil.

When they did, in the late 1800s, surface seeps and methane vents played a crucial role in the California oil boom, during which most of the state’s large oil fields were discovered, starting with the Los Angeles Oil Field.

“Back a hundred years ago, they had people, they were called ‘smells,’ and they would smell the ground trying to see if there were oil seeps in an area,” Rector said, describing how early oil pioneers would decide where to dig.

More recently, trapped oil and methane have offered a pointed reminder of the city’s ancient subterranean history, including the mysterious 1985 explosion at a Ross Dress for Less store near the La Brea Tar Pits that sent 23 people to the hospital.

In a report the same year, a city task force noted that the source of the explosion was likely natural seepage of methane gas.

Oil production in Los Angeles County has declined dramatically since its peak in the 1920s, when it was one of the most prolific producers in the world.

But the infrastructure left in place—and whatever interaction it may have with naturally occurring seeps—remains vast and, in some ways, hidden in plain sight.

Health Impacts

In a 2023 paper exploring health impacts of oil and gas facilities on “cumulatively burdened” communities in Los Angeles County, researchers point to this hidden infrastructure.

“As government and industry negotiated to continue oil drilling within residential zones, oil extraction in L.A. County became increasingly hidden from public view, often by utilizing tall walls or hedges, and consolidating operations into fewer neighborhoods,” the authors and university researchers wrote.

Read the rest here…