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UK Council Offers Emotional Support To Staff “Discomforted” By Seeing The National Flag

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UK Council Offers Emotional Support To Staff “Discomforted” By Seeing The National Flag

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

A council in the county of Essex, close to London, has been ridiculed for offering emotional support to employees they claim are feeling unsettled by seeing so many people raising the national flag in the streets of towns and cities across the country.

As we have highlighted, the action is being taken by everyday people in Britain who are sick to the back teeth of mass illegal immigration and the fallout it’s having on their communities.

An email sent to staff by Essex County Council states that it is “aware of the increasing visibility of St George’s and Union Jack flags displayed on road signs, bridges and trees in parts of Essex”.

The email continues, “While these symbols may hold different meanings for different people, we recognise that for many – particularly our colleagues of colour – they can evoke feelings of discomfort and be associated with anti-immigration rhetoric”.

Anti-illegal immigration, yes. Go on.

“We stand firmly against all forms of racism and discrimination, and we are committed to fostering a safe, inclusive, and respectful environment for everyone,” the email ridiculously states, as if being perturbed about boat loads of illegals washing up in dinghies and being put up in four star hotels at taxpayer expense and allowed to wander freely around local communities is “racist”.

As we highlighted yesterday, it’s the centrist position of most British people now.

The council email continues:

As your senior leadership team, we want to express our deep concern and solidarity. We stand firmly against all forms of racism and discrimination, and we are committed to fostering a safe, inclusive, and respectful environment for everyone.

If you are feeling unsettled or affected by what you’re seeing, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

You can speak with your line manager, Service Manager, Global Majority Leads, Antonia, Assistant Director, or Director. We are here to listen, support you, and ensure that both you and the children and families we serve feel safe and valued.

Making the actions of Essex Council even more ridiculous is the fact that right outside their own HQ building there flies a Union Jack and  St George’s Cross.

Commenting on the situation, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage noted “I’ve got to tell you, as an Essex MP, and yes, I was in Clacton at the weekend and there are an awful lot of St George’s crosses.”

“And yes, there are some in places they ought not to be. But I found this whole thing rather uplifting,” Farage added, labelling the council’s actions as “unbelievable.”

Farage’s GB News guest Lord Maurice Glasman remarked “You get mugged and your bag nicked and that’s nothing to do with them, but you put a flag up and it’s suddenly an issue.”

Former Attorney General Sir Michael Ellis also responded “This is two-tier. The council won’t fix a pothole but worry about this.”

In related news, the British government has won its legal fight against a separate local council that sought to shut down a migrant hotel in Essex.

The Court of Appeal ruled on Friday that a temporary injunction obtained by Epping Forest District Council against the continued use of the Bell Hotel to house so called “asylum seekers” should be overturned.

The hotel has been a site of intense protest by locals and anti-mass immigration activists for weeks following the arrest of a migrant charged with sexually abusing a child.

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

Tyler Durden
Sun, 08/31/2025 – 08:10

A Dark Theory: Russian Strategy In Ukraine

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A Dark Theory: Russian Strategy In Ukraine

Authored by Armchair Warlord,

A dark theory for the evening…

Let’s talk about Russian strategy in Ukraine…

Looking at developments lately, specifically:

(1) the Ukrainian casualty leak showing an astronomical 1.7M KIA/MIA; and

(2) the Ukrainian collapse north of Pokrovsk

I thought should revisit a dark thought I had a while ago, namely that, “maybe the killing itself is the point of all of this.”

I’ve said before that the Russians have fought an extraordinarily clean war in Ukraine, but it should be understood that there is a very legalistic shade on that assessment.

They’ve killed very few civilians, and Ukrainian propagandists are perpetually beclowning themselves trying to pretend that the usual single-digit handful of injured civilians that accompany the latest attack using hundreds of standoff weapons fired into city centers (producing secondary explosions visible from outer space as military targets hidden among civilian infrastructure are destroyed with surgical precision) somehow constitute gEnOCiDe rather than some of the most well-controlled warfighting in the history of the business.

There is another and far darker side to Russia’s “clean” war, however.

Let us consider the fate of the Armed Forces of Ukraine – legal combatants all, whom the Russians can and do target and kill without limit. I mentioned the casualty leak earlier, but I feel this needs to have a line drawn under it – one point seven million personnel killed or missing in action in the AFU, over the course of the war. 1.7 MILLION. Seven or eight percent of Ukraine’s prewar population, probably something like a quarter of the entire national cohort of military-aged males, dead or missing. Casualties on the scale of a genocide, sufficient to permanently cripple any postwar Ukrainian nation.

Casualties multiple times that which I assessed two years ago as sufficient to shatter the AFU based on the experience of Nazi Germany.

This brings me to the Ukrainian collapse north of Pokrovsk two weeks ago, in which a run-of-the-mill Russian attack walked through twenty kilometers of Ukrainian defensive belts and into open country.

The Ukrainian propagandists coped by whining about how the single most important front sector for the AFU had somehow “run out of infantry.”

But did the Russians throw in a mobile reserve to collapse the front and chase the AFU back to the Dniper, despite doubtless knowing full well what was going on? No, they did not – they consolidated in the breach and awaited the inevitable, panicked Ukrainian counterattack, in which they would have the opportunity to destroy Ukraine’s remaining elite troops.

Which brings me to my conclusion.

The Russians have had countless opportunities to make large advances in this war, especially recently – the Ukrainian front line is an absolute shambles and their “drone wall” tactic will falter against any serious attack. So ineffectual is the AFU that very few Russian moves at the front even face serious opposition these days, with most geolocations of Russian advances showing them already established in place and dealing with harassment by kill drones after having seized positions bloodlessly. The Russians have in fact consistently foregone breaking the front and taking swathes of ground in favor of killing the largest possible number of Ukrainian soldiers on the existing front line under the existing attritional combat dynamic.

This “tactical directive” held true even during the Battle of Sudzha-Korenevo, fought in prewar Russia. Rather than counterattacking aggressively to evict the AFU, the Russians saw the opportunity to kill gigantic numbers of Ukrainians in a trap the enemy wouldn’t be able to extract themselves from for ideological reasons, and they took it. That battle ended up being nine months of hideously lopsided butchery that broke the back of the AFU.

All of this makes observing the war more than a little maddening, but it’s a consistent pattern of behavior that begs for explanation.

So here’s my theory.

The Russian government has consistently sought to end the war via peace treaty with the existing Ukrainian government, not via regime change, outright conquest, or even killing enough of that government to find a more flexible interlocutor among the Maidanites. Putin apparently wants a treaty with Zelensky. The Russians have also consistently made demands of the Ukrainian government – and its NATO sponsors – that are absolute political nonstarters for the Maidan-era regime and which that regime, by its very nature, simply cannot accept. Russian language rights, Orthodox religious rights, demilitarization, large territorial concessions which would see the AFU surrender vast urban areas without a shot fired. And yet the Russians insist, and they’re going to continue killing Ukrainian soldiers at ever-more lopsided ratios until they get their way.

Which leads me to the brutal conclusion: Putin doesn’t want to see Ukraine conquered. He’s never publicly expressed any desire for that.

The consistent Russian policy is instead to see Ukraine – a “free” and “independent” Ukraine, having come to this impasse of its own sovereign will – utterly humiliated.

Putin wants to make Zelensky put on a suit, come groveling to the Kremlin, and sign a treaty that will see the Maidanite government surrender its arms, disgorge huge amounts of territory, and reverse every single anti-Russian policy position it ever had.

Ukrainian nationalism will be discredited overnight by the hands of those very nationalists, and the economically irrelevant, demographically shattered rump state will be sucked back into Russia’s political orbit in a matter of days.

So of course the Russians are only advancing in the most leisurely way possible.

Their goal is to place the Ukrainian government into a militarily untenable situation so as to force a flamboyantly humiliating peace treaty upon them that includes large territorial concessions beyond the line of control – the ultimate Ukrainian taboo – so as to discredit Ukrainian nationalism by the hands of the very ultranationalists who took their nation to war in the first place.

Tyler Durden
Sun, 08/31/2025 – 07:35

Spain Burns

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Spain Burns

Authored by Nicolás Sánchez via the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE),

Some laws extinguish fires; others ignite them. In Spain, a country that has mastered the art of legislating against reality, we have more of the second kind. Every time private property is violated and individual responsibility is replaced with state imposition, problems multiply. The State tends to cover a bad law with an even worse one, like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.

For decades, the 1957 Forestry Act imposed strict limits on the private management of woodlands.

Owning a forest did not mean deciding how to use it: activities were tightly regulated, and uses were subject to administrative supervision. The law’s intended to keep the land as “forest” permanently, shutting the door to any alternative use.

The result was property emptied of content, where owners bore the burdens but enjoyed few legitimate benefits.

A large share of forest fires in Spain are deliberately set. The 1957 Act did not automatically prevent burned land from being rezoned or given other uses. Much depended on urban planning discretion and later administrative decisions. In practice, this opened the door to suspicions of intentional fires, since once burned, land could lose its forest value and gain urban or agricultural interest. Each summer, as flames spread across the hills, voices pointed to urban interests lurking behind the smoke. The most infamous case was Terra Mítica, where a fire preceded the rezoning of the land to build the theme park.

No hard proof was needed for the idea to take root in public opinion: fire could be the first step to business. The problem is that for the herd of public opinion and lawmakers alike, the solution was never to confront the root of the problem or to give landowners freedom to manage their forests without needing to burn them. Instead of removing perverse incentives and letting each owner care for and profit from his land, lawmakers chose the path they know best: another legal lock.

The 2003 Forestry Act was introduced as the great modernization of the forest regime. In reality, it did not solve the root problem, since restrictions on the free use of property were maintained and even expanded. Landowners still could not manage their plots without administrative approval. The big change was the “thirty-year rule”: if woodland burns, it cannot be rezoned or given a different use for three decades. The logic was that if there was no profit after a fire, the incentive to start one would disappear. However, this measure only shifted incentives. No one would now set a fire to have land rezoned (something that, in fact, was never clearly proven), but it opened a new possibility: sabotage. Imagine a plot of land in the process of rezoning. If a competitor wanted to block it, all it would take is setting it on fire. If the flames came before the paperwork was finished, the project would be dead for thirty years.

The distorted incentives to provoke fires are only part of the problem. The other major consequence of Spain’s forestry laws lies not in why fires start, but in why they spread with such violence: decades of legal restrictions have turned forests into vast warehouses of fuel. What makes these fires national catastrophes is not only that they are sometimes deliberate, but that once they begin—whether natural or intentional—they rage out of control through woodlands abandoned by design.

A fire does not grow from a spark alone; it needs fuel. Dry biomass, fallen branches, and flammable underbrush are the real drivers of disaster. This accumulation is no accident, but the result of a legal framework that for decades has encouraged abandonment. The 2003 Act, far from solving the issue, maintained restrictions on land management and even expanded them. It limited permitted uses (article 36) and required every action to pass through technical plans and authorizations (article 37). At the same time, it imposed on owners the duty to prevent fires and keep their land in good condition (article 48), while making it an offense to cut, uproot, or even gather firewood without authorization (article 67, sections c and j).

This is a heap of contradictions: owners are told to prevent fires, but stripped of the incentives to do so, while facing costs, paperwork, and potential fines. An asset that generates expenses but no income is an asset destined for abandonment. For centuries, such cleaning never depended on bureaucrats or subsidies but on spontaneous practices that benefited both locals and owners. Shepherds brought their herds, woodcutters collected branches, and neighbors gathered fuel for their homes. All this reduced biomass while providing legitimate use. Today, those practices are punished or buried under endless authorizations.

Even setting aside the perverse incentives the law creates to provoke fires, and leaving aside the abandonment it encourages, a greater problem remains: What happens after the forest has already burned? Once the fire has spread, the 2003 Act adds a decisive obstacle. By imposing the thirty-year rule, any burned land was locked, and all incentives to restore what was destroyed disappeared. The law made no distinction between a natural fire, an accident, or arson: all were equally condemned. What owner would invest in recovering a woodland that, by law, had to remain sterile for thirty years? Instead of encouraging regeneration, the law produced the opposite effect: leaving the forest abandoned and thus perpetuating devastation.

Paradoxically, in the name of environmental protection, those with the greatest interest in conserving the land have been expelled from it.

The result is a forest effectively belonging to no one: not to the owners, who cannot manage it; not to the traditional users, who no longer benefit from it; and not to the State, which lacks the means to care for it. This is the real problem.

So each summer the ritual repeats: helicopters flying overhead, dramatic TV footage, unstoppable flames, exhausted firefighters, and politicians posing among the ashes. The scene plays out year after year, always with the same promises of reform and new commissions of study.

Meanwhile, the underbrush keeps growing, dry and ready, waiting for the next spark. The fire won’t wait, and the law won’t stop it.

 

Tyler Durden
Sun, 08/31/2025 – 07:00

Escobar: Russia-China – From The Memory Of WWII To BRICS/SCO Synergy

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Escobar: Russia-China – From The Memory Of WWII To BRICS/SCO Synergy

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

Three – interlocked – dates ahead of us could not be more crucial in shaping the next configuration of the currently incandescent geopolitical chessboard.

1. August 31/September 1st. Tianjin – half-an-hour by high-speed rail (120 km, roughly $8) from Beijing. The annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), with all 10 member-states, two observers (Afghanistan and Mongolia) and 14 dialogue partners (plenty from Southeast Asia). Crucially, Putin, Xi and Modi (his first visit to China in 7 years) will be on the same table, as well as Iran’s Pezeshkian. That’s a compounded BRICS/SCO heavyweight show. This summit may be a turning point for the SCO as much as the summit in Kazan last year was for BRICS.

2. September 3. The Victory Day Parade in Tian’anmen Square, officially celebrating the 80th anniversary of “the Victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War”. No less than 26 heads of state will be present, including Putin (on a 4-day state visit). They come from all over the Global South, but none from the Global North.

3. September 3. Vladivostok. The start of the 10th Eastern Economic Forum (EEF), a must-go to understand the finer points of the Russian national strategic priority to develop the Arctic and the Russian Far East, including vast tracts of Siberia; that’s a mirror policy of the Chinese effort to “Go West”, which started in 1999, to develop Tibet and Xinjiang. A who’s who of corporate and business circles from all latitudes across Eurasia will be present in Vladivostok. Putin addresses the plenary session right after his return from China.

Taken together, these three dates span the whole spectrum of the Russia-China strategic partnership; the increasingly interlocked geopolitical and geoeconomic aspects of Eurasia integration and Global South solidarity; and the concerted push by Eurasia actors to accelerate the drive towards a multi-nodal, equanimous system of international relations.

Western revisionism hits an iron wall

It’s impossible to overstate how important the Victory Day parade is for the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese in a thousand years – and more – will never accept WWII American revisionism such as “the US and Japan jointly ended a war 80 years ago”. And much less European revisionism: “Europe’s commemorations of the Normandy Landings also involved a shocking rewriting of the history of the Eastern Front. These actions remind us that the September 3rd military parade’s attendance list has become a criterion for identifying which countries remain steadfast in their anti-fascist stance.”

So Putin in Beijing on the Chinese Victory Day parade is a mirror image of Xi in Red Square on May 9, when Russia officially celebrated the 80th anniversary of the USSR victory in the Great Patriotic War.

No wonder the Chinese Foreign Ministry is adamant: the historical victory of WWII cannot be distorted. And this shared historical memory – vehemently against Nazi-fascism and its resurgence in the West – is a guiding light for the Russia-China multilateral, multipolar, and multi-nodal coordination, from the UN – unfortunately sliding towards irrelevancy – to the dynamic BRICS and SCO.

Modi talking directly to Xi on Sunday, on the sidelines of the SCO summit, seals the sorry fate of the tariff war on India – part and parcel of the Empire of Chaos Hybrid War on BRICS, and for that matter, a great deal of the Global Majority.

The latest mantra spun by Trump 2.0 circles is that New Delhi is supporting Moscow’s war on Ukraine by buying Russian oil, thus helping to enrich Putin even more.

End result: the original RIC (Russia-India-China), all of them sanctioned/tariffed, locked up in a tight embrace.

The sound of the Eurasia heartland rockin’

Vladivostok may carry a few surprises – but on the US-Russia business front.

First of all, speculation is rife on whether Trump might have decided to turn the planned EU theft of Russian foreign assets upside down, and instead force the funds to be invested in the American economy. If that would be the case – after all Trump himself proclaims “I can do anything I want” – there’s absolutely nothing the chihuahua EUrocracy can do to prevent it.

Then there’s the enticing possibility of US-Russia deals being discussed. One option would be ExxonMobil returning to the Sakhalin-1 mega gas project. There’s also immense American oil industry interest in re-starting the sale of equipment for LNG projects, including the Arctic LNG-2; and the US purchasing Russian nuclear icebreakers.

That would be beyond ground-breaking, in more ways than one – because it would enable the US to directly compete with the Northern Sea Route (or Arctic Silk Road, in Chinese terminology), which is being built by Russia as an alternative to the Suez Canal. ​

On the Ukraine front – and that will be discussed in excruciating detail at the SCO summit – there are no illusions among the members, according to Central Asian diplomatic sources. And that mirrors the predominant Russia-China interpretation. The Empire of Chaos will never desist from conforming Ukraine as a strategic buffer against Russia; keep a key foothold in Eurasia; and keep raking in solid profits (in euros) for the industrial-military complex.

That’s what permeates everything from the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) and the Pentagon’s Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA) to NATO’s Comprehensive Assistance Package (CAP), launched nine years ago and de facto running the military backbone of the Kiev/NATO armada. Add to it US Navy P-8 Poseidon spy planes circling over the Black Sea on a daily basis – watching everything happening in the waters from Novorossiysk to Sevastopol.

As much as we’ll be absorbing new moves on the chessboard during the next crucial week, in the end we all circle back to the Mackinder-drenched “The Grand Chessboard” as outlined by the late Brzezinski.

Before the end of the millennium, the fear was that an alliance of Russia, China – and Europe, prior to the consolidation of the EU – would manage to control Eurasia, and thus the world, following Mackinder.

Well, now we can picture the ghost of Mackinder listening to the latest remix of Deep Purple’s Made in Japan – the greatest live rock album ever, which was recorded in the early 1970s… in Asia. In this new, Asia-centered world, the top Global South actors at BRICS/SCO exhibit over twice the US GDP, and are paving the way to de facto replacing the US dollar by increasing trade in their own currencies.

Even the previous US autopen administration authorizing the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines – to make sure Europe would be dependent on expensive US natural gas and not Russia’s – did not substantially alter the chessboard.

Apart from the fact that Europe is committing serial harakiri; is advancing its own de-industrialization; and for all practical purposes is now dead as a geopolitical actor. It’s all about the Empire of Chaos versus BRICS/SCO.

So let next week rock: call it the sound of the Eurasia heartland re-affirming its sovereignty. Play it loud.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/30/2025 – 23:20

Fentanyl Involved In 70% Of US Drug Overdose Deaths

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Fentanyl Involved In 70% Of US Drug Overdose Deaths
Fentanyl Involved In 70% Of US Drug Overdose Deaths

Perhaps the most dangerous thing about fentanyl is the fact that, due to its low price and high potency, it is often used to lace other drugs.

Whether it’s heroin, cocaine, meth or counterfeit pills mimicking prescription opioids such as Vicodin or Oxycontin – fentanyl is frequently used to increase the potency of illicit drugs, often unbeknownst to the user.

As Statista’s Felix Richter reports, this hidden presence dramatically increases the risk of accidental overdose, since people may take what they believe is a familiar drug but are actually playing a game of Russian Roulette, always in danger of ingesting a lethal dose of fentanyl.

According to CDC data, synthetic opioids, i.e. mostly fentanyl, are now involved in 7 out of 10 overdose deaths in the U.S. after having contributed to a dramatic surge in drug-related mortality over the past decade.

Infographic: Fentanyl Involved in 7 in 10 U.S. Drug Overdose Deaths | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

Due to the aforementioned, often hidden presence of fentanyl in other drugs, it has dramatically driven up overdose deaths involving drugs like cocaine or methamphetamine as well and is now involved in 76 percent of cocaine overdose deaths and in 66 percent of overdose deaths involving methamphetamine or other psychostimulants.

Between 2013 and 2023, the number of overdose deaths involving cocaine has surged sixfold from less than 5,000 to almost 30,000 – an increase almost entirely driven by the rise of fentanyl.

The same trend can be observed for meth and other psychostimulants, which were involved in 35,000 overdose deaths in 2023, up from 3,600 ten years earlier.

The following chart, based on the latest CDC data, illustrates what makes fentanyl such a vicious drug. Incredibly potent and dangerous on its own, it turns the use of other drugs into a deadly gamble.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/30/2025 – 22:45

China Accelerates Coal Plant Commissioning To 9-Year High

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China Accelerates Coal Plant Commissioning To 9-Year High

Authored by Michael Kern via OilPrice.com,

Despite record solar and wind capacity additions and booming renewable energy output, China is not giving up on coal, on the contrary. 

During the first half of 2025, China commissioned as much as 21 gigawatts (GW) of coal power, the highest amount in the first half of the year since 2016, the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and Global Energy Monitor (GEM) said on Monday in their H1 2025 biannual review of China’s coal projects. 

Projections are that coal capacity commissioned for the full year would exceed 80 GW.  

Globally, China is the leader in renewable energy capacity installations, but it is also a leader in coal-fired power and continues to be the key driver of record-high global coal demand. 

In addition, China is looking to boost its domestic coal demand and prices this year.

Coal prices in China have been depressed this year, weighing on the profits and profitability of the coal producers.

Despite previous signs of slowdown in coal power last year and a clean energy boom so far this year, coal power remains strong in China, with new and revived projects the highest in a decade, clean energy proponents CREA and GEM said in their half-year report. 

The surge in coal plant commissioning follows the jump in coal project permitting in 2022 and 2023, when China was permitting, on average, two new coal power plants every week. 

The years 2022 and 2023 saw more than 100 GW of coal power capacity approved in each of the two years.

“This trend will likely continue into 2026 and 2027, unless policy action is taken,” the report said. 

Just 25 GW of coal projects were permitted in China in the first half of 2025, but new and revived projects came to 75 GW, the highest in a decade, and construction starts and restarts reached 46 GW, which is equivalent to the entire coal power capacity of South Korea, CREA and GEM found. 

“China’s clean energy boom is driving both economic growth and decarbonisation, but continued coal expansion risks holding it back,” said Qi Qin, lead author of the report and China Analyst at CREA.

“More coal power plants would not only waste investment, but also crowd out renewables–the real engine of China’s economic future.”  

Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/30/2025 – 22:10

Watch: Maduro Stages Military Show Of Force As US Warships Near

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Watch: Maduro Stages Military Show Of Force As US Warships Near

Venezuela is really trying to flex back after the Trump administration dispatched three Navy destroyers to waters near Venezuela this month, and Reuters has said that a nuclear-powered fast attack submarine is also en route to the region.

In response Venezuela’s defense minister has ordered increased drone surveillance and naval patrols along the country’s coastline, with a statement calling a “significant” mobilization of both drones and naval vessels, including larger warships positioned further north within Venezuelan territorial waters. Extra troops are being placed on the ready in border states of Venezuela as well. Socialist strongman President Nicolás Maduro is also making a big show, saying he’s ready to fight the imperialist invaders…

The US has claimed the new deployment is aimed at combating drug trafficking, but ultimately Caracas is concerned that this could be a renewed push for regime change in the country which has vast deposits of oil.

The White House has long accused Maduro of leading a drug trafficking network known as the “Cartel de los Soles” – though there’s been no smoking gun proof or evidence that this is the case. He’s also been accused of weaponizing migration – though Maduro has shown himself ready to engage with American diplomatic delegations on the matter.

Maduro has rejected the accusations, countering that, unlike Colombia, Venezuela does not cultivate coca plants or produce cocaine, and that the United States’ immigration crisis is not Caracas’ fault or problem.

American warships headed toward Caribbean waters off Venezuela as tensions soar:

Previously the NYT wrote of the new naval build-up that “It signals Mr. Trump’s continued willingness to use military forces to carry out what has primarily been considered a law enforcement responsibility to curb the flow of fentanyl and other illegal drugs.”

Maduro has been busy positioning some 15,000 police and military officers in sensitive border states of Zulia and Táchira, signaling concern over cross-border threats.

Maduro decorates a member of the special forces during a ceremony in Caracas, Venezuela, on Thursday. Miraflores Palace via Reuters

“There’s no way they can enter Venezuela,” he said said while visiting a special forces unit days ago. “Today, we are stronger than yesterday. Today, we are more prepared to defend peace, sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Maduro said while addressing the troops, according to the state-run Venezuela News Agency.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/30/2025 – 21:35

Denver School Accused Of Violating Title IX Over All-Gender Restrooms

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Denver School Accused Of Violating Title IX Over All-Gender Restrooms

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Education Department said on Thursday that Denver Public Schools violated Title IX, the law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools, by converting sex-separated restrooms into “all-gender” facilities.

Denver East High School in Denver on April 17, 2019. David Zalubowski/AP

The department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) also found that the school district violated the law by allowing students to use intimate facilities matching their gender identity rather than their biological sex.

The finding followed an OCR investigation into Denver’s East High School earlier this year after it converted a girls’ restroom into a multi-stall all-gender facility. The agency said the school had an exclusive restroom for males on its second floor but none for females.

The school district has said that the all-gender lavatory, which has 12-foot partitions between stalls, was created as the result of a student-led process.

The school district later created a second all-gender restroom on the same floor as the first.

However, OCR said the district’s actions did not resolve its Title IX violation “because males are still allowed to invade sensitive female-only facilities.” The agency cited a complaint from a female student who said that “boys kept staring at her, looking her up and down, kind of taunting her” when using the bathroom, which left her “very uncomfortable.”

Another complainant alleged that a male teacher frequently entered the restroom “to check on things,” which made female students uncomfortable and raised privacy concerns, according to the agency.

“Denver is free to endorse a self-defeating gender ideology, but it is not free to accept federal taxpayer funds and harm its students in violation of Title IX,” acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor stated, noting that the district had created “a hostile environment” for its students by endangering their safety and privacy.

OCR offered the school district a 10-day window to voluntarily make changes or risk enforcement action, though it did not specify what actions could be taken in the event of noncompliance.

The school district is required within that timeframe to convert all gender-neutral restrooms back to sex-designated restrooms and rescind any policies that allowed access to facilities based on gender identity.

OCR also directed the school district to adopt biology-based definitions for the words “male” and “female” in all Title IX-related policies and practices, according to its statement.

Denver Public Schools officials said they had received the results of the OCR investigation and were determining their next steps.

A Jan. 24 statement on the school district’s website noted that it will defy President Donald Trump’s executive order, which stated that only two sexes will be recognized as the policy of the United States.

“DPS remains committed to following all applicable state and federal laws, which remain in place, providing ongoing recognition of and protection from harassment and discrimination on the basis of LGBTQ+ status,” it stated.

The Epoch Times reached out to Denver Public Schools for further comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

The Associated Press and Aaron Gifford contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/30/2025 – 21:00

Australia’s Largest Rare Earth Miner Plans US Expansion To Compete With China

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Australia’s Largest Rare Earth Miner Plans US Expansion To Compete With China

Australia’s Lynas, the world’s largest rare earths miner outside China, plans to raise A$825mn (US$538mn) to boost stockpiles, expand capacity, and invest in magnet makers in Malaysia and the US, according to the Financial Times. Rare earths are critical for products ranging from weapons systems and electric vehicles to medical devices and bicycles.

“We want to be able to participate, either on an operational or a supply or an equity basis in this part of the supply chain,” said Amanda Lacaze, Lynas’s chief executive, during an investor call.

FT writes that the fundraising, which includes a fully underwritten share issue and an A$75mn share purchase plan for existing shareholders, comes as western governments push to counter China’s dominance of rare earths. Last month, Washington bought a stake in MP Materials and set a decade-long price floor nearly double current market rates. Lynas is in talks with the US, Australian, and Japanese governments over similar measures to support a non-Chinese supply chain.

Lynas has already benefited from Japanese financing to build out “light” rare earths production and, more recently, expanded into “heavy” rare earths. “Lynas broke the Chinese monopoly on lights in 2013. This year, in 2025, we broke the Chinese monopoly on heavies,” Lacaze said.

Still, Lacaze warned of “significant uncertainty” around the company’s US defence-backed Seadrift project in Texas due to difficulties securing offtake agreements.

For the year ending June 30, Lynas reported revenue up 20 per cent to A$556mn but net profit fell to A$8mn from A$84.5mn a year earlier, reflecting production issues and rising costs tied to expansion.

As we have detailed repeatedly, last month, the US government bought a stake in MP Materials, the Las Vegas–based rare earths company, as part of a broader effort to reduce reliance on China for critical minerals. The move underscores Washington’s push to build a domestic supply chain for rare earths used in defense systems, electric vehicles, and other technologies.

MP Materials, which operates the Mountain Pass mine in California, is one of the few US-based producers and had previously held merger talks with Australia’s Lynas that collapsed in 2024.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/30/2025 – 20:25

“We’re Losing Our Community”: Short-Term Rentals Are Ruining Three Rivers, Residents Say

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“We’re Losing Our Community”: Short-Term Rentals Are Ruining Three Rivers, Residents Say

In the early 1970s, Three Rivers was a quiet foothill town where cattle ranchers sparred with a wave of tie-dyed newcomers looking for open space and a slower way of life. Back then, the biggest changes came from the clash of cultures. Today, the struggle is more existential: how to balance the demands of millions of tourists drawn to nearby Sequoia National Park with the needs of a community of just over 2,000 people, according to SF Gate.

Three Rivers’ beauty — the tumbling Kaweah River, rolling green hills in spring, and proximity to the park’s giant sequoias — has made it an increasingly popular destination. A quick search on Airbnb turns up hundreds of listings, from canvas tents pitched in backyards to 11-bedroom riverfront mansions. On summer afternoons, visitors line up for frozen yogurt and craft beer, cars squeeze into makeshift roadside parking, and restaurants overflow. The town feels bustling, but nearly everyone visible will be gone in a matter of days.

The SF Gate article says that the constant churn has left many locals uneasy. Residents say the explosion of short-term rentals has eroded neighborhood ties, driven up housing costs, and even led to more encounters with bears rooting through tourist trash. The issue boiled over last year when the Tulare County Board of Supervisors struck down a proposed ordinance that would have set stricter limits on short-term rentals. The rules would have capped occupancy, tightened noise and trash restrictions, and required rental owners — many of whom live hours away in Los Angeles or the Bay Area — to post contact information.

“The trash is all over the place, and we don’t know who to call because the owners are all out of town,” one resident complained at the time. “And the guests come here to party, but that’s secondary to me. The primary one is we’re losing our community.”

For longtime locals, the changes are especially stark in the schools. Nancy Brunson, who has lived in Three Rivers for three decades, remembers when about 250 children were enrolled in the local elementary and middle school. Now, she estimates the number is closer to 70. High schoolers are bused half an hour to Woodlake in the Central Valley, and some traditions — like the annual field trip to San Francisco — have disappeared due to dwindling participation. “It changes the nature of a class tremendously, because the smaller the group of kids, the less diverse of an experience they have,” Brunson said. She ties the decline to the lack of affordable housing for young families, many of whom are priced out by vacation rental demand.

But others see short-term rentals as a lifeline. Cara Brown, who rents out a studio on her property while living in the main house, has hosted guests for nearly a decade. She bristles at the idea that all Airbnb operators are absentee investors. For her and her husband, the extra income makes it possible to stay in their home through retirement. “Nobody wants cheesy hotels,” she said, arguing that tourists sustain local businesses in a town otherwise isolated from major cities.

That doesn’t mean hosts and critics don’t share frustrations. One common grievance is where the money goes. In 2024, Three Rivers generated more than $1.3 million in short-term rental taxes, but because the town is unincorporated, all of it flowed back to Tulare County. Locals say that leaves them without funding for basics like walking paths or beautification projects. “We’re all upset about that,” Brown admitted.

The debate in Three Rivers echoes fights happening across California, from South Lake Tahoe to Santa Barbara, where residents are also pushing for tougher rules on rentals. Yet the stakes feel different here. Three Rivers is relatively isolated, with no neighboring towns to absorb overflow housing needs. Many residents fear the fabric of the community itself is fraying — not just its housing stock.

As Brunson put it, the challenge isn’t whether tourists belong in Three Rivers. It’s whether families still do.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/30/2025 – 19:15

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