Via Remix News,

The highest crime rate of any German city is Bremen, and it just so happens that this city state also has the highest share of residents with an immigration background, at least compared to other states.

“Data from the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) now show that, relative to population, no major German city has a higher crime rate. 15,424 crimes per 100,000 inhabitants are the highest, ahead of Frankfurt am Main (14,600) and Berlin (14,252),” writes Weser Kurier.

The Free Democrats (FDP) recently labeled the city the “most dangerous city in Germany.”

Bremen clearly ranks first in terms of robberies, with 194 cases per 100,000 inhabitants.

In second place is Frankfurt am Main with 14,600 registered crimes per 100,000 inhabitants. Frankfurt was in first place last year.

In third is Berlin with 14,252 registered crimes per 100,000 inhabitants.

Bremen also tops the charts with theft statistics, with shoplifting and theft from vehicles also extremely high.

However, it should be noted that all of this data is for 2024, and already Bremen is seeing a decrease in some crimes this year, including a 20 percent drop in robbery so far in 2025. Critics also contend that Bremen’s crime rate, while still extremely high, is not actually the highest due to a backlog of cases being included in the 2024 statistics. Even if that backlog is removed, Bremen remains at the top of the list for a broad range of crimes.

No matter which way the data is analyzed, the share of migrants involved in crimes in Bremen still remains incredibly high.

In fact, non-German suspects are responsible for 73 percent of all crime in Bremen in 2024, compared to 57 percent in 2023.

As Buten an Binnen notes:

“Young men from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Syria stand out as suspected perpetrators. This group of people continues to be kept in mind, and many of the perpetrators have been imprisoned.”

What all Germany’s cities with the highest crime rates have in common is that they all have the highest shares of migrants in the country.

According to bpb, “the proportion of migrants in Bremen is very high, at 45.1 percent of the population. This makes Bremen the most migrant of all German states.”

Berlin and Bremen are unique in Germany, as they are both states and cities. However, among cities, Bremen still tops the list of one of the cities with the most foreigners as a percentage of the population, in close competition with Frankfurt.

There may be arguments that Bremen, Berlin, and Frankfurt are dangerous merely because they are cities. However, in Germany, there are some useful reference points. For example, Bremen and Dresden have nearly the same population size of around 500,000 people. Meanwhile, Dresden only features residents with a migrant background, numbering only 10 to 12 percent. The crime rate is drastically lower in Dresden, despite Dresden being in the much poorer eastern part of Germany.

Read more here…

In a huge development which is no doubt related to recent nuclear saber-rattling in the context of the Ukraine war, the US has likely stationed nuclear weapons in Britain for the first time in more than 15 years, according to The Telegraph and other British media reports.

“An American C-17 transport plane visited RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk on Thursday, making a transatlantic journey from Kirtland Air Force base in New Mexico, where the US Air Force (USAF) stores nuclear bombs,” The Telegraph writes Tuesday. 

“Analysts said it was likely that the flight contained nuclear bombs, which were last stationed in the UK in 2008, before being removed under the Obama administration,” the report continues. 

The British newspaper says that supporting evidence that this is the case includes previously revealed details of an upcoming “nuclear mission” at Lakenheath.

This mission was first made known in unclassified documents that The Telegraph says were likely published by the US government by mistake, or else it could have been an intentional leak in order to signal Russia.

The logistics of last Thursday’s rare US transatlantic flight from New Mexico also suggests a highly sensitive mission to transfer nuclear assets:

The airspace over the base was restricted on Thursday and the aircraft did not immediately return to the US, in what one analyst told The Times appeared to be a “one-way drop-off”.

The plane also refuelled over the east coast of the US which The Aviationist specialist news website said this was a clue that it was flying a priority mission.

Separately The Times had also reported the story, including the detail that the US military transport plane which flew to Lakenheath had flown from the US with its transponders on, allowing it to be tracked by foreign governments.

One analyst said, “Flying transpondered C-17s from hot storage in Kirtland to Lakenheath and then returning and not going to a storage facility tells me this is a one-way drop-off flight.”

“Sometimes these particular C-17 flights are flown without transponders. So, the fact that they transpondered, this suggests to me that this has got to be deliberate,” the analyst added.

This is your weekly reminder that there is no such thing as a “tactical” nuclear weapon.

Any use of a nuclear weapon is immediately at the Strategic level, and if used against a nuclear power, will result in a general nuclear exchange. https://t.co/vFJks9wBOa

— cdrsalamander (@cdrsalamander) July 20, 2025

Again, this seems some deliberative ‘messaging’ to Moscow, coming as President Trump is seeking to pressure the Russian and Ukrainian sides to make progress at the negotiating table. Washington knows it has little leverage, given Kiev forces have remained on a backfoot, and Russia is making slow but steady progress in the east.

The Kremlin says that it is ‘monitoring’ these reports. Recently Russia’s strategic doctrine has been updated, given President Putin a little broader interpretation concerning deployment of nuclear weapons. It is believed that Russian tactical nukes are also still on Belarusian soil, which has greatly alarmed Europe.

Via Remix News,

The European Commission’s seven-year budget is already facing backlash, with Ursula von der Leyen’s request for €2 trillion from member states being slapped down by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and other leaders.

One of the main voices against the budget is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who says it is designed to bring Ukraine into the EU as a member and hand Kyiv billions of euros.

“If we look only at financial aspects, we should see that in addition to the 20-25 percent of budget resources allocated to Ukraine, 10-12 percent of previously taken out loans go to loan repayments,” said Orbán in an interview with Kossuth Radio’s “Good Morning, Hungary” program.

Adding up money to Ukraine and debt repayments, 30 percent of the budget goes to areas that were not included in the previous seven-year budget, said the Hungarian prime minister.

“That’s why everyone in the European Union is shouting,” he added.

“The budget is a great science to understand, you have to be able to read not only what is written in it, but also what is hidden behind the lines,” Orbán said.

The Hungarian prime minister said the problem with the budget is that it does not have a clear strategic basis.

“If we do not know what it is for, then it cannot be good, because we must first answer what goals we want to achieve with it,” he said.

As far as Orbán is concerned, the main goal of the budget is to admit Ukraine into the EU.

⚠️🌾 A shocking new EU budget leak reveals a dangerous gamble: Ukraine would get a massive funding boost, while European farmers lose out. This plan risks sidelining rural Europe and threatening families across the continent. Brussels must not abandon Europe’s farmers to bankroll… pic.twitter.com/J74f27q1ND

— Orbán Viktor (@PM_ViktorOrban) July 16, 2025

“The EU budget has only one obvious purpose: to bring Ukraine into the EU, and these funds are transferred to Ukraine,” he said.

According to the prime minister, the right move would be not to accept the Ukrainians but to instead develop a kind of cooperative relationship with them.

He also said that not only is there uncertainty about Ukraine, but money is also being lost for agriculture. The prime minister asked the question: “What will happen to farmers if the EU does not support them in the future?”

The budget will not survive

According to Orbán, this budget will not survive, with EU countries lining up to reject it. This may be much more than bravado, as it is widely reported at the moment that a number of key EU leaders are coming out against the budget, most notably German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

“A comprehensive increase in the EU budget is unacceptable at a time when all member states are making considerable efforts to consolidate their national budgets,” said Stefan Kornelius, spokesperson for Merz’s government. “We will therefore not be able to accept the Commission’s proposal.”

A path forward will not be easy, as Orbán notes that any EU budget agreement requires unanimous approval from all member states.

Given that the Commission is trying to tie rule-of-law sanctions to a variety of expanded areas, which countries like Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia are certain to reject, negotiations are expected to be intense.

During the last seven-year budget, many conservatives and those on the right criticized the previous Orbán government and their then Polish conservative allies for agreeing to the rule-of-law sanctions in exchange for signing off on the budget. The move turned out to be a bad one for Hungary, Poland, and other sovereignist-minded political parties. The EU froze tens of billions for both nations, and for Poland, only unfroze the money once the left-liberal Tusk government came to power. For Hungary, approximately €10 billion still remains frozen.

Read more here…

Authored by Gregory Copley via The Epoch Times,

We know that the world is moving into an age of uncertainty. But towards what? Our planning does not extend that far…

We are too preoccupied with the immediate to even consider the longer-term.

And if governments are fighting for or against immediate challenges, are societies fighting for the same reasons, or are they fighting for something more at the core of their identity?

Firstly, we need to look at just some of the immediate vital issues in the global strategic evolution which cannot be ignored, or set aside in favor of pressing domestic issues.

These are the issues defined largely by governments, and take the public along with them. But ask what is it that societies seek, and it goes more deeply than platitudes about “world peace.”

We are now seeing the conclusion of trends of the past few hundred years.

In the longer-term, we are moving—unless strategic consideration is given—into an age bereft of history, identity, and considered values and goals.

So, firstly, let’s look in the short-term:

• U.S. relative dominance revives, but is moving toward isolation: The United States, under the Donald Trump presidency, is moving into a position of relative global dominance, largely through decisive action, but also because of the reduction in capabilities of other states. Perceived U.S. prestige and trustworthiness continues to decline, making global U.S. operations more expensive to prosecute.

• Xi is gone; the PRC has begun its change: The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been laid to waste economically, resulting in the removal of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping from any real power as of July 2025. The CCP is also under threat, but the June 2025 U.S.–PRC trade deal has kept the party alive and in control of China, at least for now. It will take decades to restore China to strength. To survive with a minimum of chaos, the PRC will need to transform into a true market economy, working equitably with other trading powers, or else the CCP will collapse. Essentially, China could become a new country based on its deeper past.

• Diminished likelihood of Taiwan invasion: The likelihood of a PRC invasion of Taiwan in the coming few years is now lower, but the situation remains unstable.

• An effective end to 20th-century treaties: Most international governance and treaty organizations were rendered meaningless or weak by the first half of 2025. That extends from the United Nations to the European Union (EU), BRICS, OECD, etc. and bilateral treaties on trade, security, or other issues. Everything is now up for discussion. The collapse of the EU may allow European states to revive.

• Iran now altered, will alter more soon: Change in the government of Iran, which would change the nature of Iranian society back to more traditional lines, is closer, because of the recent Israeli–U.S. war with the Iranian clerics. A new Iranian leader could emerge from the military, pushing the clerics back to the mosques. This will usher in new access to and from the Central Asian states.

• Russia is emerging as a major global power, given the relative stability of its economic base and political structure, but will need eventually to consider a leadership transition. The mechanism will remain opaque. There is no evidence that Russia would be competitive with the United States, strategically, over the coming few years, other than by its alignment with India. In this context, the Russian war with Ukraine is essentially over, in meaningful terms.

• Turkey as the font of instability: Turkey is moving further into instability, and, to distract public discontent with the increasing poverty, could move aggressively into a conflict situation directly with Israel and/or Greece, and attempt further military incursion into Syria and to assert dominance over the new Syrian government.

• Illegal migration reaching an apogee? Illegal migration into Western Europe from Africa and the Middle East could become greatly more manageable if and when the agreement is reached—possibly in 2025—for a unified government of Libya under a traditional leadership. The example of U.S. curtailment of illegal immigration in 2025 may be a contributing factor as well.

• Much of Africa “in reorganization”: Africa, host to the most devastating current wars in terms of lives lost and people displaced, has entered a new, painful era of self-determination and re-defined borders. Some areas are better placed than others to emerge successfully into the new era.

• Central Asia re-emerges: Central Asia, including Azerbaijan and Afghanistan, emerge as a new strategic zone, gaining great economic leverage as it breaks its landlocked status through Iran and new modi vivendi are achieved with Armenia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

• The Americas start “reorganizing”: Chile became the first major South American state to undergo substantive transformation, but Brazil could also see major change with its next election.

• Oceania in decline: Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific states now seemed to have tipped into political and economic stagnation, which may only be reversed by radical restructuring of a type only possible following a major collapse, which may be decades coming.

The longer-term: The current tipping point coincides with the end of the “baby boom” generation, which followed World War II. With its passing, because of the purposeful elimination of historical education, comes a reduced ability to move forward retaining historical cultures, languages, and identity. How, then, will states define themselves and their goals? Will they sink more into mass identity, or will individual thought revive? How long has it been since societies have known for what principles they stood?

Will societies survive and dominate more if they retain identity and long-term purpose? What are the options, at this stage, for retaining historical continuity? For retention of traditions? For re-seizure of education systems? Is there any program, anywhere, to begin planning for the future?

Policymakers may have immediate reasons for engaging in conflict, but societies see the wars as a quest for meaning.

Will states which have regained their old identities—their meaning—prosper best by mid-century?

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

Authored by Peter Berkowitz via RealClearPolitics,

Progressive left and postliberal right intellectuals converge in teaching scorn for America’s founding principles. Attacking from different angles, both camps employ grossly flawed arguments to justify the repudiation of the U.S. Declaration of Independence’s ringing affirmation 249 years ago of the unalienable rights that human beings share.

Captive to the taste for the gaudy and the melodramatic nurtured by American higher education, both camps want to revalue traditional values, change the world rather than understand it, and replace history’s complexities with simplistic grand narratives of good and evil. At the same time, their wild exaggerations, contrived charges, and enthusiastic followings provide an occasion to restate America’s founding principles, recognize their pertinence to the enduring challenges of free and democratic self-government, and rebuild civic education around them.

The 1619 Project prominently set forth a version of the progressive left’s signature opinion that systemic racism disfigures America. Published in the summer of 2019 as a special issue of The New York Times Magazine, the collection of essays undertook to correct the record about America’s founding.

Led by Nikole Hannah-Jones, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her contribution, 1619 Project essayists argued that the United States was not truly founded in July 1776 when the Declaration of Independence proclaimed, “these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States.” Rather, America came into being in 1619 when 20 enslaved Africans arrived in the fledgling British territory of Virginia.

Abolished in 1865 by the 13th Amendment, the evil institution of slavery was always a grotesque affront to the equality in unalienable rights affirmed by the Declaration. Nevertheless, according to the 1619 Project, slavery forms the deepest substratum of American existence, has touched every aspect of the United States, and remains the defining fact of the nation’s life. In the 1619 Project’s telling, the Declaration of Independence’s self-evident truths about individual rights and the consent of the governed were always so much window-dressing designed to distract from and thereby perpetuate slavery. Yet it seems lost on 1619 Project producers, distributors, and consumers that despite the resentments and distrust that currently wrack the nation, the United States remains by most any objective measure the freest, most tolerant, and most prosperous multi-religious, multi-racial, and multi-ethnic great power in history.

Approaching matters from the opposite side of the political spectrum but with similar vehemence, “Why Liberalism Failed,” a 2017 volume by University of Notre Dame political science professor Patrick Deneen, elaborates the postliberal right’s characteristic view that freedom in America has produced a systemically corrupt and decadent society. The chief villain, according to Deneen, is John Locke. But to convict Locke of subverting Western civilization in general and America in particular, Deneen reduces the 17th-century British thinker, and indeed the entirety of the modern tradition of freedom, to a tendentious reading of a few lines from the opening pages of his 1689 classic, “The Second Treatise of Government.”

Locke’s great sin, in Deneen’s account, involves giving authoritative expression to the proposition – central to the Declaration and a cornerstone of American constitutional government – that human beings are by nature free and equal. The proper political expression of this equality in freedom, maintains Locke, consists in liberty under settled laws enacted, enforced, and adjudicated within a constitutional order to which one has consented.

Deneen, however, attributes a dark secret teaching to Locke, according to which Lockean freedom entails emancipation from the imperatives of virtue, duty, and nature’s and God’s law. For Deneen, Lockean freedom, and therefore American freedom from the beginning and in its essence, gives rise to an incoherent and inhuman demand for the chimera of absolute freedom. Deneen does not allow his polemic to be sidetracked by such core components of Locke’s thinking as his insistence on the duty to honor God’s authority, his distinction between liberty and license, and his 1693 book, “Some Thoughts Concerning Education,” which deals with the virtues and how parents should foster them.

In America’s universities, many students will encounter the progressive left’s and postliberal right’s vilification of America’s founding principles instead of receiving a proper introduction to the case for the Declaration and the Constitution. For such students and indeed for citizens whose instincts, sentiments, and experience tell them that America’s founding principles sustain the nation, Vincent Phillip Muñoz provides an excellent tonic in “The American Revolutions of 1776,” which appears in the summer issue of National Affairs.

A professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame (like Deneen), Muñoz tactfully understates matters in observing that “As America’s 250th anniversary approaches, not everyone is eager to celebrate the Declaration of Independence and the political revolution it sparked.” His essay, a version of which will appear in the American Enterprise Institute’s forthcoming volume “Religion and the American Revolution” – part of AEI’s “America at 250” initiative (I contributed to an earlier volume in the series) – briskly lays out three revolutionary achievements of 1776. These achievements deserve our gratitude, warrant celebration, and suffer suppression by or exclusion from university curricula. All three champion unalienable or natural rights and the limited government that secures them.

The first revolution of 1776 affirmed that just government is grounded in the consent of the governed. Without questioning God’s authority, the American view broke with the then-prevalent notion that legitimate political authority derives from divine right. And without challenging the classical premise that citizens should govern and be governed in accordance with human nature, America’s founders rejected the classical idea that wisdom or moral virtue provides decisive title to rule.

America’s founders held that while human beings are not equal in all respects and not free in all ways, we are born equal in rights and therefore neither masters over nor subordinate to others. Each has equal right to govern himself or herself, but no one has the right to govern another. One crucial exercise of the right to govern oneself consists in consenting to the exercise of political authority. In practice, that means that each has an obligation to obey only those laws – the disagreeable as well as the agreeable – that issue from established constitutional processes to which he or she has consented. Consent can be given expressly, as in the formal ceremonies by which immigrants officially acquire citizenship, or tacitly, as in the manner of the native-born who acquire the obligation to obey the laws through living under them and enjoying their benefits.

The second revolution of 1776 taught that government’s primary purpose is to secure natural or unalienable rights. America’s founders parted ways with the traditional view that government’s purpose was to perfect or save souls, but the parting was not driven by indifference or hostility to higher concerns. Rather, the founders proceeded from the conviction that care of the soul was the proper responsibility of individuals, families, and religious institutions.

Securing rights did not preclude government from assuming additional responsibilities, provided that they were consistent with the equal rights of all, to advance the common good. “Unlike influential progressive thinkers such as Herbert Croly and political leaders such as Franklin Roosevelt, the founders did not hold that a fundamental purpose of government is to provide directly for the people’s material needs or to ameliorate all unfortunate circumstances,” Muñoz writes. “They instead understood the role of government as securing the conditions, including the economic conditions, that would allow Americans to be responsible – to employ their natural rights to provide for themselves, their families, and those under their care.”

The third revolution of 1776 maintained that religious liberty, the right of individuals to worship in accordance with conscience, was an essential right. Far from expressing or implying antipathy to religion, limiting government’s authority over religious belief and practice stemmed from a determination to protect faith. Prohibiting government from establishing religion or impairing its free exercise reflected the belief that true religion could not be dictated by civil law because it was grounded in conscience and choice. Another reason to restrict political control over religion was the distinct tendency of government officials to lack competence in interpreting scripture and managing religious teaching and observance.

From the founders’ perspective, moreover, the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion were not political antagonists but rather political allies. In their view, since human beings are by nature free and equal and endowed with reason, only faith practiced in accordance with conscience could be pleasing to God. And because the numerous Christian denominations at the founding affirmed that every human being is precious in God’s eyes and that power must be divided between church and state, religion in America bolstered the nation’s natural rights principles.

These three revolutionary achievements of 1776 – grounding just government in citizens’ consent, focusing government on securing rights, and protecting religious liberty out of respect for faith – deserve to be widely heralded in next year’s celebrations of the Declaration of Independence’s 250th anniversary. And study of their origins, integration into American constitutional government, and implications for today’s challenges should promptly be placed at the center of civic education in America.

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019 to 2021, he served as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department. His writings are posted at PeterBerkowitz.com and he can be followed on X @BerkowitzPeter.

President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he reached a “massive” trade deal with Japan that will set tariffs on Japanese imports at 15% and see the key American trading counterpart and ally invest $550 billion into the US (with about the same likelihood of doing so as Stargate is to invest $500 billion in US AI technology) .

“I just signed the largest trade deal in history, I think maybe the largest deal in history — with Japan,” Trump said at an event at the White House on Tuesday after announcing the deal on social media. “And that was done with Japan. They had their top people here and we worked on it long and hard and it’s a great deal for everybody.” 

🚨 JUST IN: President Trump signs “largest trade deal in history.”

“Japan!”

WOW.

Half a trillion.

“The tariffs kicked in better than anybody, other than me and a few others in the room, thought would happen.”

Experts FURIOUS tonight. pic.twitter.com/BXMNGPixca

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) July 22, 2025

On Truth Social, Trump explained that the pact calls for Japan to “open their Country” to US automobile imports, as well as additional agricultural imports including rice – a remarkable achievement with a country which has historically been extremely protectionist of the food staple – without specifying further. Trump has repeatedly zeroed in on auto trade as he criticizes trade imbalances with the country. Around 80% of Japan’s trade surplus with the US is in cars and auto parts.

Additional details of the preliminary agreement with Japan – including, critically, if Japanese automobiles and parts would receive a carve-out from separate 25% tariffs – were not immediately available. Trump originally threatened to place a 24% tariff on Japanese imports earlier this year, a proposal viewed as “extremely disappointing” by Ishiba. He later amended that threat to 25% in a letter earlier this month.

The issue of automobiles has been a particular sticking point in trade negotiations between the two countries. US trade negotiators have pushed Japan and other countries to accept cars built to US federal motor vehicle safety standards, rather than subjecting them to differing requirements. Meanwhile, negotiators from Japan and other countries have pushed for exemptions to Trump’s existing 25% levies on autos and auto parts. 

It was not immediately clear Tuesday if any such carveout would be established for Japan, like a planned tariff-rate quota for steel imported from the UK. Japanese public broadcaster NHK said Washington would set the rate on the auto sector at 15%, citing an unidentified government official. Shares in Japanese carmakers jumped in Tokyo trading with Toyota rising more than 10%.

Japanese-based car companies have made significant plans to invest in the US, including Isuzu Motors Ltd.’s $280 million investment in a new facility in South Carolina, and Toyota Motor Corp.’s $88 million commitment to boost production of hybrid vehicles. The US has also offered tariff relief for auto companies that assemble cars in American facilities, part of a broader effort to bring offshore manufacturing to the US.

“Japan and the US have been conducting close negotiations with our national interests on the line,” Japanese Prime Minister (and lame duck) Shigeru Ishiba said in Tokyo, just two days after suffering a huge loss for his LDP party. “The two nations will continue to work together to create jobs and good products.”

According to local media reports, the Japanese premier was linking his shaky political future to developments in the talks following the huge election setback this weekend, although when asked about the trade deal he just signed, it’s almost as if he knew nothing about it, instead telling reporters he needs to look closely at the details of agreements with the US, and that he’ll be getting further updates from his chief trade negotiator, Ryosei Akazawa

This was reminiscent of the US president’s approach: Trump has previously announced trade frameworks without many specifics only for the White House to provide details days and weeks later, as terms are hammered out.

Trump indicated at the event with Republican lawmakers at the White House that he also expects to sign a deal on a joint venture with Japan to export LNG from Alaska.

The deal with Japan came just hours after Trump announced he had reached an agreement with the Philippines, setting a 19% tariff on the country’s exports (down a whopping percent from the previous 20%). 
The flurry of activity comes days before the Aug. 1 deadline for imposing so-called “reciprocal” tariffs that will hit dozens of trading partners. 

Trump first announced the plan for sweeping tariffs on nearly every US trading partner in April, only to quickly put them on hold for 90 days amid market backlash in order to work out agreements. But that stretch saw the US finalize only a handful of deals and Trump instead moved to unilaterally impose rates on countries and blocs before the looming deadline.

While talks continue with major economies including the European Union and India, Trump said some 150 smaller countries will be hit with a blanket rate of between 10 and 15%.

The yen fluctuated in early Tokyo trading, before strengthening again after the NHK report on the auto tariffs. Japanese stocks on the Topix benchmark index rose as much as 2.5% and US equity futures edged higher. 

The talks came after eight rounds of negotiations, and a week after Bessent visited Japan to lead the US delegation to the World Expo in Osaka. Japan had its upper house elections on Sunday, and while losses there significantly weakened Ishiba’s domestic position, the prime minister has cited the trade talks as one of the reasons why he needs to stay on.

In kneejerk response, this is how most asset classes reacted to the news: 

• JPY initially firmed 30bp but then unwound all of the knee-jerk reaction; it then strengthening again after the NHK report on the auto tariffs, before also reversing that gain. 
• Japanese stocks on the Topix benchmark index rose as much as 2.5% and US equity futures edged higher. 
• US Treasury futures are offered at 111-09
• S&P futures popped 20bp and have largely held onto gains
• The biggest mover where Japanese govt bonds: JGB yields spiked as futures dropped sharply lower 95 ticks at 137.65, breaching last week’s low with support near 137.59. Running volumes are up 18% from last week. The next major support is at March lows, 137.30 (a 15-year low).

UBS said that its desk flows have a strong sell bias (1:10), impacted by the US-Japan trade deal. Wednesday’s focus is the 40y bond auction – the first since PM Ishiba’s election loss. The current selloff looks a bit overdone, and maybe a decent auction could calm some nerves. Auction results are out at 12:35 Tokyo, as futures resume trading post the lunch break.

Very soon if you want AI (and even if you don’t), you won’t be able to afford AC. 

Just this morning we warned readers that America’s largest power grid, PJM Interconnect, which serves 65 million people across 13 states and Washington, DC, and more importantly feeds Deep State Central’s Loudoun County, Virginia, also known as ‘Data Center Alley‘ and which is recognized as one of the world’s largest hubs for data centers…

… had recently issued multiple ‘Maximum Generation‘ and ‘Load Management‘ alerts this summer, as the heat pushes power demand to the brink with air conditioners running at full blast across the eastern half of the U.S.

But as anyone who has not lived under a rock knows, the deeper issue is that there’s simply not enough baseload juice to feed the relentless, ravenous growth of power-hungry AI server racks at new data centers. 

“There is simply no new capacity to meet new loads,” said Joe Bowring to Bloomberg, president of Monitoring Analytics, which is the independent watchdog for PJM Interconnection. “The solution is to make sure that people who want to build data centers are serious enough about it to bring their own generation.”

Well, there is another solution: crank up prices to the stratosphere. 

And that’s precisely what happened. As Bloomberg reports, business and households supplied by the largest US grid will pay $16.1 billion to ensure there is enough electricity supply to meet soaring power demand, especially that from a massive buildout in AI data centers.

The payouts to generators for the year starting June 2026 topped last year’s record $14.7 billion, according to PJM Interconnection LLC, which operates the grid stretching from the Midwest to the mid-Atlantic. That puts the capacity price per megawatt each day at a record $329.17 from $269.92.

In  response to the blowout payout, shares of Constellation Energy and Talen Energy surged in late trading in New York on Tuesday.

As millions of Americans will very soon learn the hard way, AI data centers are driving the biggest surge in US electric demand in decades, leading to higher residential utility bills. That’s a key reason why PJM’s auction, once only tracked by power traders and plant owners but now increasingly a topic for general consumption as electricity bills are about to hit an all time high, has also become closely watched by politicians and consumer advocates. 

As Bloomberg notes, this is the first auction that included both a price floor and cap, setting the range at $177.24 to $329.17, which of course was the clearing price level reached in this auction. Why even bother pretending there is an auction: just set the price at the max and be done with it. Last year’s 600% jump in capacity prices set off a political firestorm, resulting in PJM reaching a settlement with Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro to essentially cap gains for two years and make auction prices more predictable after wild swings in recent years.

Despite the increase in costs across the grid, the price cap trimmed costs for consumers who saw the biggest hikes in the last auction. Exelon’s Baltimore area utility reached a $466 last time, while Dominion Energy’s Virginia territory came in at about $444.

Payouts to generators stayed at high levels due to surging demand from big data centers coming online swiftly, said Jon Gordon, policy director of non-profit clean energy advocacy Advanced Energy United. New facilities are consuming as much power as towns or small cities, coinciding with a wave of older power plants shutting down and lagging investment in new supplies and grid upgrades, he said.

The per-megawatt price exceeding the 2024 auction, and well closing at an all time high, is bullish for independent power producers including NRG, Talen, Constellation and Vistra, Barclays analyst Nick Campenella had forecast. These generators have spent more than $34 billion so far this year on deals to mainly buy up power plants fueled by natural gas to feed the AI boom especially in PJM.

Authored by Aaron Maté via RealClearInvestigations,

Although Robert Mueller failed to find an election conspiracy between Donald Trump and Moscow, the former Special Counsel threw a lifeline to the Russiagate narrative by alleging that the Kremlin had engaged in a “sweeping and systematic” effort to get Trump elected and “sow discord” among Americans. 

Six years later, that questionable but enduring claim continues to unravel.

According to newly declassified documents, U.S. intelligence leaders concealed high-level doubts about one of Russiagate’s foundational allegations: that Russia stole and leaked Democratic Party material to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. In a September 2016 report that was never made public until now, the NSA and the FBI broke with their intelligence counterparts and expressed “low confidence” in the attribution to Russia.

The previously undisclosed dissent about Russia’s alleged hacking activities in the 2016 election is among several revelations released last week by Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence. According to Gabbard, President Obama and senior members of his cabinet “manufactured and politicized intelligence” in its waning months to wage “a years-long coup against President Trump.”

Gabbard’s material adds to a body of evidence previously reported by RealClearInvestigations that challenges the widely parroted claim about the quality of evidence and the extent of Russian “interference operations” in the 2016 election. These conclusions – based on questionable assertions presented as hard facts – have been falsely portrayed as an intelligence consensus. When Trump, the nation’s commander-in-chief, cast doubt on the Russian interference allegations in a July 2018 news conference, former CIA chief John Brennan denounced him as “nothing short of treasonous.”

It turns out that Trump was not out of sync with the U.S. intelligence community he was accused of betraying. 

“Low Confidence” in Core Allegation

Until now, the purported U.S. intelligence consensus on Russian meddling has been conveyed to the public in three seminal reports. 

The first was a January 2017 intelligence community assessment (ICA) released in the final days of the Obama administration under the direction of Brennan and then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The ICA accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering an “influence campaign” to “denigrate” Democratic candidate Clinton and “help” Trump win the 2016 election. Some of this effort involved propaganda on Russian media outlets and messaging on social media. 

The larger component hinged on the allegation that the GRU, Russia’s main intelligence agency, stole emails and documents from the Democratic Party and released that material principally via two online entities, DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0, as well as the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has long denied that Russia or any other state actor was his source. Nevertheless, the January 2017 ICA stated that U.S. intelligence had  “high confidence” that Russia engineered the hack. 

The Mueller report, issued more than two years later, advanced the ICA’s claims with even more confidence and specificity. A bipartisan Senate intelligence review, released in August 2020, endorsed the ICA and Mueller reports and was widely treated as a vindication of the conduct of the intelligence officials behind them.

The documents newly declassified by Gabbard show that the ICA, Mueller, and Senate reports all excluded the intelligence community’s own secretly identified doubts and evidentiary gaps on the core allegation of Russian meddling.

In a previously unpublished Intelligence Community Assessment circulated within the government on Sept. 12, 2016 (hereafter “September ICA”), the FBI and NSA expressed “low confidence” that Russia was behind the hack and release of Democratic Party emails. U.S. intelligence agencies, the report explained, “lack sufficient technical details” to link the stolen Democratic Party material released by WikiLeaks and other sources “to Russian state-sponsored actors.” 

The joint FBI-NSA dissent was especially significant given their central role in investigating Russia’s alleged cyber meddling. With its sweeping foreign surveillance capability, the NSA is the agency best positioned to assess the source of the alleged hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). Meanwhile, the FBI had taken the lead in probing the cyber-theft and release of stolen material from the Democratic Party networks. The private acknowledgment that these two agencies did not have the “technical” data to link the hacking to Russia bolsters longstanding criticism, overlooked by legacy media, that the “Russian interference” allegations lacked supporting evidence.

Contrary to subsequent assertions, the September ICA shows that the U.S. intelligence community had no hard evidence that Putin ordered the theft of Democratic Party material as part of an influence campaign to help Trump. 

“If  the disclosures of the DNC and DCCC documents were indeed orchestrated by the Russian intelligence services,” the report stated, “those services would very likely have sought Putin’s approval for the operation.” This passage indicates that U.S. intelligence had declined to endorse assertions promoted by Brennan and leaked to the media during Trump’s first term, that a highly placed Kremlin mole had captured Putin’s orders to meddle in the 2016 election in support of Trump. The alleged mole was later identified as a mid-level Kremlin official named Oleg Smolenkov, who left Russia to live in the Virginia suburbs under his own name. 

President Obama Pushes Narrative

Rather than make the September ICA and its dissenting contents public, the Obama administration told a much different story, one that ensured that allegations of “Russian interference” would hobble Trump’s presidency even before he took office. 

On Oct. 7, 2016, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) issued a joint statement claiming that the “U.S. Intelligence Community is confident” that Russia hacked the Democratic Party in order to “interfere with the U.S. election process.” No mention was made of the NSA and FBI’s shared “low confidence” in that allegation, or their lack of technical evidence for it. 

Notably, the FBI objected to formally accusing Russia and refused to participate. But by that point, the joint statement had a more powerful endorser. According to testimony from Jeh Johnson, who then served as DHS secretary, President Obama “approved the statement” and “wanted us to make [it].” On December 6, 2016, Obama made another request, asking the intelligence community to produce a new version of the ICA that could be made public. As RCI has previously reported, and a recent CIA review has newly confirmed, that version of the ICA – released in January 2017 and hereafter referred to as the “January ICA” – was tainted by a hurried production schedule and the exclusion of key intelligence agencies under the close control of Brennan and Clapper. 

Apart from references to the Steele dossier – now debunked opposition research financed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign alleging a Trump/Russia conspiracy – it contained no new evidence that would have reversed the previous assessments.

After ordering a replacement ICA, Obama administration officials moved to silence dissent. According to Gabbard’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence, a senior official who “led” the September ICA on allegations of Russian meddling was “sidelined” from the new process. This unidentified official, whom Gabbard’s office describes as the “ODNI Whistleblower,” was shunned after “questioning his leadership about why an IC assessment was being created that contradicted multiple IC assessments.”  The ODNI whistleblower also asserts that he was later pressured to accept unsupported findings in the January ICA, “including that the Russian government had a preference for President Trump.”

Speculation Accepted as Fact

Meanwhile, in a newly disclosed Dec. 7 memo written one day after Obama’s ICA tasking, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence acknowledged that the confidence level about alleged Russian hacking had barely changed. 

The document claimed to have “high confidence” that Russia had, in 2015 and 2016, hacked into networks belonging to the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. But when it came to whether this Russian hacking actually led to exfiltration, dissemination, and public release to actors like WikiLeaks, the document used qualified, tepid language that reflected continued uncertainty. “Most IC agencies,” the DNI wrote, only had “moderate confidence that Russian services probably orchestrated at least some of the disclosures” of stolen Democratic Party material (emphasis added).

The Dec. 7 DNI memo also inadvertently confirmed another evidentiary gap: a reliance on evidence provided by Trump’s campaign rival. The “attribution of the intrusions” to Russia, the DNI wrote, was “based on the forensic evidence identified by a private cyber-firm and the IC’s review and understanding of cyber activities by the Russian Government.” 

That private cyber-firm is CrowdStrike, which worked directly for the Clinton campaign, and which had triggered Russiagate the previous June by accusing Russia of hacking the DNC servers. As RCI has previously reported, despite the high stakes involved, the FBI acceded to the DNC’s refusal to let the bureau independently analyze its server, deferring instead to CrowdStrike’s analysis. The timing of the FBI’s “low confidence” assessment suggests that it did not find CrowdStrike’s initial attribution to Russia convincing. CrowdStrike submitted its third and final report to the FBI on Aug. 24, three weeks before the September ICA recorded the FBI and NSA’s dissent on the Russian hacking allegation. 

The DNI’s reliance on the forensics of a firm working for Trump’s political opponent – just as the FBI simultaneously relied on the Clinton-funded Steele dossier in its fruitless hunt for collusion – was kept under wraps. And as RCI has previously reported, so was another critical disclosure made in closed-door congressional testimony one year later. 

In December 2017, CrowdStrike President Shawn Henry testified that his firm “did not have concrete evidence” that Russian hackers had exfiltrated data from the DNC servers. He said there were signs of potential Russian malware on the servers, but no evidence that any information had been uploaded by them. Put another way, they might have had keys to the servers, but there was no proof that they had removed any content. Henry’s admission to the House Intelligence Committee was also kept from the public throughout the Mueller probe.

For unspecified reasons, the FBI again declined to endorse the intelligence assessment on alleged Russian meddling. On Dec. 8, one day after the DNI memo was circulated, an FBI official replied that the bureau was “drafting a dissent,” and asked that the ODNI “remove our seal [and] annotations of co-authorship.” In response, an ODNI official opined that the FBI’s “only difference” with the Dec. 7 memo “was over confidence level on the attribution.” The ODNI official also pointed out that the FBI’s disagreement was with “I&A.” This was a reference to the Office of Intelligence and Analysis at DHS, which had co-authored, along with the Clapper-run ODNI, the Oct. 7 statement that the FBI had refused to endorse, and that falsely claimed to speak on behalf of the “U.S. Intelligence Community.” 

The FBI’s continued dissent underscores that, by the time Obama had ordered the production of a new ICA, the intelligence community still had not reached consensus on the attribution of the email hacking to Russia. 

Despite the lingering divisions over the evidence for alleged Russian hacking, a meeting between President Obama and top principals just one day later claimed to have reached a united front. On Dec. 9, Obama huddled with top national security officials, including Clapper and Brennan, at the White House. Notably, the two agencies that had previously dissented on Russian hacking – the FBI and NSA – were not represented by their respective leaders, James Comey and Mike Rogers, but instead by deputies Andrew McCabe and Richard Ledgett. According to a newly declassified summary of that meeting, the Principals Committee resolved to “publicly release and attribute to Russian intelligence services technical and other information …  in intelligence reporting ” from that same day. It is unclear why Obama and his principals suddenly felt confident publicly attributing the Democratic Party hack to Russia when the FBI and NSA had expressed “low confidence” in that judgment based on a lack of technical evidence.

Spreading the False Narrative

As Obama and senior intelligence officials concealed the community’s doubts about the alleged Russian hack and releases, as well as their reliance on a Clinton campaign contractor to investigate it, more false claims were leaked to the public.

Two days after the DNI’s Dec. 7 memo, the Washington Post published a story claiming that a “secret assessment” from the CIA had concluded that the hacking of Democratic Party emails was “part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances” in the 2016 election. A senior U.S. official told the Post that it was “the assessment of the intelligence community” that Russia sought “to help Trump get elected. That’s the consensus view.” In fact, there had been no such assessment or consensus, only strong doubts about the hacking allegation at the heart of the purported “Russian operation.”

Rather than refute the erroneous Post story, the Obama administration continued to promote its unsupported narrative. Three weeks later, on Dec. 29, the Department of Homeland Security, this time joined by the FBI, issued a report that newly promoted the allegation of Russian email theft. Without mentioning the IC’s low-to-moderate confidence in Russian hacking or the integral role of Clinton contractor CrowdStrike, the joint report described the alleged Russian hacking effort as “likely leading to the exfiltration of information” from Democratic Party networks. It is unclear how the FBI arrived at this conclusion after voicing at least two previous dissents. This pattern, where privately identified evidentiary holes were later supplanted by publicly confident assertions, was repeated time and time again to advance the Russia narrative.

After burying dissenting opinions on Russian meddling and leaking false claims to the media, Obama administration and intelligence officials released a newly sanitized version of the ICA on Jan. 6, 2017. Two other versions of that document with higher levels of classification were produced, one of which – a “downgraded” product below the highest-level classified one, hereafter referred to as the Downgraded ICA – has been newly released by Gabbard. 

The Downgraded ICA points to more evidentiary gaps. When it comes to the ICA’s contention that Putin ordered Russian military intelligence to pass stolen Democratic Party material to WikiLeaks and other conduits, the ICA makes no reference to any evidence of such an order. Instead, it points to a speculative guess based on a psychological reading of Putin’s perceived grievances:

Putin most likely wanted his intelligence services to discredit Secretary Clinton because he has blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime in late 2011 and early 2012 and holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging him, judging from press reporting. Given this, we assess with high confidence that the GRU was directed to pass material it collected to WikiLeaks and other intermediaries. 

In the public version, the January ICA suggested that an online persona that released stolen Democratic material, Guccifer 2.0, had a “likely Russian identity” tied to the GRU. But the Downgraded ICA acknowledges that U.S. intelligence only has “moderate confidence” that Guccifer 2.0 and another site, DCleaks.com, were “under direct GRU control.” By contrast, the Mueller report of March 2019 asserted as fact that the GRU “created” and “used both the DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 personas” to release stolen material publicly and transfer it to WikiLeaks. 

Most significantly, Gabbard’s new releases raise the question of how U.S. intelligence officials went from their low to moderate confidence in Russian interference allegations through the last months of 2016 into “high confidence” in the first week of January 2017, a stance they have clung to in the ensuing eight years even as the underpinnings of those claims have unraveled.

In its memo on the new documents, Gabbard’s office notes that the January ICA’s assertion of a Putin-ordered effort to defeat Clinton claimed to be drawing on “further information” that had “come to light” since the 2016 election. That “further information,” Gabbard’s office states, was later found to be the Steele dossier, which Brennan and others have falsely claimed played no part in their analysis. 

Whatever the case, these new disclosures confirm that to make the case of Russian interference and present it to the public as a consensus view, U.S. intelligence officials in the Obama administration suppressed ample doubts within their highest ranks.