Authored by Emel Akan via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump appeared on Michael Cohen’s radio show and commended his former attorney for recanting his previous statements.

Their conversation marked a surprising thaw years after their relationship collapsed amid public feuds and legal battles. Part of the interview with Cohen’s show “When You Know, You Know” aired on 770 WABC Radio at 6 p.m. Thursday. The rest will be released on Aug. 23.

“They weaponized you. They weaponized a lot of people,” Trump told Cohen. “I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said, and that’s a big thing that you did.”

“You’re going to go down as a man of courage, great courage, because you did something that a lot of people wouldn’t have the guts to do,” Trump told Cohen.

“I guarantee your family greatly respects what you did.”

This was Cohen’s first public conversation with Trump in eight years.

Cohen shared a Substack article that served as a recollection of the public feud the two had, which included Cohen’s testifying against Trump in his New York City criminal trial in 2024. Cohen served as one of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office’s star witnesses, alleging the president was involved in a plan to pay off a former adult film actress, Stormy Daniels, during his 2016 campaign.

“Eight years of silence. Hundreds of thousands of headlines. Fifteen years of history fractured in an instant, and somehow, against almost every expectation, here we are,” Cohen wrote.

Ever since he announced that Trump would appear on his radio show, Cohen stated that his inbox became a “digital battlefield.”

“It has been flooded with hatred, anger, disbelief, and some of the most spectacularly vicious things imaginable,” Cohen wrote.

In 2018, Cohen was sentenced to three years in federal prison after pleading guilty to campaign finance violations, tax evasion, bank fraud, and lying to Congress. He completed his sentence and supervision requirements in November 2021.

Speaking to Politico on Aug. 19, Cohen answered a question about whether he would seek a presidential pardon.

“We’ll see,” he said in response. “Will I make that request down the road? I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.”

Trump, who was convicted in a jury trial on 34 counts of falsifying business records, denied the charges against him and pleaded not guilty. He has long said that the Manhattan district attorney’s case and cases that were brought against him in Georgia, Washington, and Florida were a “political witch hunt.”

The judge who oversaw the case, Juan Merchan, sentenced Trump to an unconditional discharge in January 2025, about two months after Trump won reelection.

In his first term, Trump often criticized Cohen in response to claims his former lawyer made about him, writing on X in 2018, “If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen!”

During the interview with Cohen, Trump also talked about the economy, Venezuela, and the Iran conflict.

He said that if he ran again, “I think I’d win by 25 points.”

“The economy has never been stronger,” the president said.

Regarding Iran, Trump said, “It’s not easy to make a deal” with the regime.

“Nobody knows who’s leading,” he said.

Trump also defended his military decisions, telling Cohen, “I would have done it again a hundred times.”

ActBlue co-founder Matt DeBergalis sat before the Committee on House Administration, the House Oversight Committee, and the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday and declined to answer a single substantive question during a closed-door deposition that reportedly lasted less than half an hour. DeBergalis invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and left. DeBergalis joins a growing list of ActBlue executives who have chosen silence over testimony as Republicans dig into whether the Democratic Party’s primary fundraising platform let foreign money slip into American campaigns.

ActBlue has raised roughly $20 billion for Democratic candidates and liberal causes since its founding.

House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil opened the Committee’s investigation into ActBlue in 2023. The original complaint centered on a simple but significant security gap: ActBlue did not require a credit card CVV number to process donations. This policy made it easy to run stolen or fabricated card numbers through the platform undetected. 

“ActBlue executives and staff are aware that both foreign and domestic fraudulent actors are exploiting the platform but do not take the threat seriously,” a committee report released in April 2025 concluded. ActBlue rejects that characterization, and has called the investigation politically motivated and denies breaking any law.

Whether the platform has genuinely tightened its standards since then is the question Steil says he still cannot answer. In an interview with Fox News ahead of Thursday’s deposition, he laid out the committee’s core uncertainty. “It’s unclear how serious ActBlue is now taking fraud,” Steil said. “We know that they weakened their fraud standards previously. Did they make the changes that are needed to root out foreign funds from coming into U.S. Elections?”

DeBergalis is not the first ActBlue official to invoke their Fifth Amendment rights. ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones previously pleaded the Fifth during a public hearing before the House Administration Committee In June.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan pressed her directly on a figure attributed to her own board chairman. “Your board chairman said ActBlue accepted up to $38 million in contributions in 2024 that had the signs of foreign origin,” Jordan said. “How much fraud is too much for all?”

Wallace-Jones declined to answer.

“What is so frustrating for me, and I think countless others – they have a right to not answer our questions,” Steil said. “But I think the American people also have a right to know exactly what’s taking place on this platform that has raised roughly $20 billion for Democratic candidates and liberal causes since its creation,” he said.

ActBlue board chairwoman Kimberly Peeler-Allen offered the closest thing to a public defense back in April, when she told The New York Times that “less than 1%” of contributions during the 2024 cycle showed signs of foreign origin, a cycle in which ActBlue raised $3.82 billion. That percentage, applied to a number that large, still lands somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars, which is roughly the figure Jordan cited to Wallace-Jones two months later. ActBlue’s own lawyer, Vincent Cohen, wrote to the committee chairs that same April, defending the platform’s technical safeguards and insisting the organization “built a robust platform with anti-fraud technology.”

The Justice Department is also investigating whether ActBlue adequately policed fraud on its donation portal. ActBlue maintains it has done nothing wrong and frames the entire multi-committee, multi-agency effort as a partisan exercise aimed at hobbling the left’s most important fundraising infrastructure ahead of the midterms.

That defense gets harder to sustain each time a key person from ActBlue, who has knowledge of the platform’s internal decisions, won’t answer questions by invoking their constitutional right against self-incrimination.

A mob of liberal women decked out in pink is taking to the streets in front of the Plymouth Superior Courthouse in Plymouth, Massachusetts for a rally in support of Lindsay Clancy during her ongoing murder trial.  The group, which is often accused of being “terminally online”, has been invading social media discussions for weeks to inject arguments in defense of Clancy, who confessed to the murder of her three helpless children. 

Now, these women (and a few beta husbands) are going offline and showing up en masse to explain why Lindsay Clancy should go free. 

Hundreds of Lindsay Clancy supporters, many wearing pink with the words “Believe,” “She Needed Help” and “Peace For Lindsay,” gathered Thursday outside the courthouse.  Several of the women said Clancy’s story resonated with them and that they wanted to raise awareness about how the mental health system treats women.

Clancy’s lawyer does not dispute that she killed the children, but says she should not be held criminally responsible because she was mentally ill and suffering from “postpartum psychosis.”  

Lindsay Clancy brutally strangled her 3 kids to death

Current scene outside the courthouse: pic.twitter.com/LC6do0LdzT

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) August 20, 2026

This defense claim is highly strategic.  Contrary to the arguments of leftists, in the past women have often received lighter sentences or escaped prison time by exploiting an insanity plea.  In studies on postpartum in murder cases, around half of women child killers got a “Not Guilty By Reason Of Insanity” verdict after claiming postpartum psychosis as the cause. 

Those are good odds.

The message among feminists is clear:  Women are perpetual victims, therefore they cannot be convicted as predators.  In the liberal mythos, women are pure and devoid of masculine evil, and thus, when they commit atrocities it is only because the system forced them to do so, or because the system broke them and drove them insane.  

HAPPENING NOW: A sea of Lindsay Clancy supporters dressed in pink gathered outside Plymouth Superior Court Thursday morning as the Duxbury mother’s murder trial nears a pivotal moment. pic.twitter.com/Vcitza3pQp

— Boston 25 News (@boston25) August 20, 2026

In other words, there can be no structure of justice for female criminals, because in the minds of feminists, there are no female criminals (except female conservatives). 

The postpartum argument is held up as if it is proof of innocence, but in reality, it suggests that the person is even more dangerous than a typical criminal.  If an otherwise unassuming woman has the ability to appear absolutely normal and insinuate herself into the lives of others, only to become a bloodthirsty murderer of children at the flip of a switch, then she can never be trusted to enter back into society ever again.  She can never be trusted to have children or go near children again.

The punishment should be more severe, not less.  This is why America used to have a large network of mental hospitals, to keep people like this locked away for good.  Instead, liberal ideology has created an environment in which criminals with the right identity are treated with more empathy than their victims.  

If this continues for much longer, it will mean the downfall of western civilization.

The Lindsay Clancy trial has also become another focal point for what many now call a “plague” on the internet:  Amateur Detective Wine-Moms (ADWMs).  

Conspiracy theories on social media, spread by these same women, assert that Lindsay Clancy is actually a “patsy” and that her husband is the killer.  Even though numerous pieces of evidence including surveillance footage and cell phone tracking shows Clancy’s husband at a local CVS pharmacy at the time of the murder, these women have read hundreds of true crime novels and think they are better investigators than the authorities involved.

Some commenters note that a similar mob of female detectives has been spreading endless conspiracy theories about Tyler Robinson and the murder of Charlie Kirk, even though it’s on record that Robinson confessed to his family, friends and boyfriend that he killed Kirk.  Facts and evidence do not matter to these people. 

The problem has become so pervasive that officials within the legal system are beginning to worry that finding jurors not tainted by online madness will be impossible.  They are calling this problem the “TikTok Jury” and it is growing into a cancer. 

It’s not just the high profile cases anymore, it could be any case that happens to catch the attention of this unhinged brood of hens stalking the internet for new distractions from their meaningless lives.    

HSBC’s Global Commodity Team warned Thursday that the zinc market is flashing warning signs of extreme tightness:

Global zinc mine supply remains tight: HSBC’s Global Commodity Team expects global mine supply to fall 2.1% y-o-y to 12.5mt in 2026, driven mainly by lower production in Latin America.

The zinc market is expected to be slightly tight in 2026e, driven by a modest recovery in demand in Europe and North America amid supply disruptions at smelters and mines.

Overall, concentrate supply remains tight, and there have been smelter disruptions as well. Zinc demand has held up.

Here’s where the physical tightness is emerging: Zinc for immediate delivery on the London Metal Exchange traded at a premium of as much as $132.37 a ton over three-month futures Thursday, the widest backwardation this year.

The spread signals intensifying competition for readily available metal in warehouses. Benchmark zinc rose 1.1% to $3,802 a ton earlier today, putting it on course for a fifth weekly gain and its highest close in four years.

Analysts from Chinese brokerage Jinrui Futures Co. wrote in a note, “There are still concerns about overseas supply disruptions in zinc,” adding, “So the driving forces for the relative strength of the LME price continue to exist, together with heightened volatility around macroeconomic sentiment.”

Beyond zinc, veteran commodities strategist Jeff Currie wrote in a series of X posts Thursday that the convergence of tight physical markets, currency debasement and policy intervention represents the hallmark of a structural commodity bull cycle.

Quantix Commodity Index

Currie told his followers to “Get long and buckle up: the next leg of the ride will see more vol with higher highs across more markets.”

Read the report here.

Days after SK Hynix unveiled a staggering 40 trillion won, or $28.6 billion, “buyback bazooka” aimed at putting a floor under its shares following a sharp six-week selloff, Samsung Electronics joined the capital-return push.

The world’s largest memory-chip maker said Friday that it plans to return as much as 110 trillion won, or $80 billion, to investors this year. The twin announcements suggest the world’s top memory companies are trying to support higher valuations and reward shareholders after memory stocks surrendered some of their blistering first-half gains.

Bloomberg reports that Samsung intends to distribute roughly half of its free cash flow, including 30 trillion won in third-quarter dividends and about 15 trillion won in share repurchases for employee compensation.

Macquarie analyst Daniel Kim summarized Samsung’s capital-return announcement:

What’s new

• Samsung Electronics (SEC) updated its much-anticipated shareholder return program today after the market close. There was no change in the committed return of 50% of cumulative FCF from 2024-26.
• Its BoD is meeting in October to confirm the earlier distribution of promised FCF. So, the 3Q26 quarterly cash dividend payment should amount to Won30tr, including the regular quarterly cash dividend of Won2.45tr.
• In late January 2027, the company should determine the remaining capital return amount, which SEC estimates at Won60-80tr, and the method of distribution.
• SEC remains on our Marquee buy list.

Why it matters

• Still formulating capital return policy. Excluding the cash dividend of Won20.9tr already paid out and the executed share buyback/cancellation of Won8.4tr, the company estimates the remaining capital to be returned to shareholders at Won90-110tr, which includes the 3Q26 Won30tr payout. This is 20-35% lower than our forecast.
• Announced only the common-share repurchase of Won15tr for employee bonuses. Separately, SEC plans to repurchase 53.3mn common shares, or 0.9% of outstanding shares, which would cost Won15tr based on today’s closing price, from 24 Aug. to 21 Nov. The repurchased shares won’t be cancelled and will be paid to employees as bonuses, so they won’t count as part of the shareholder return. Samsung preferred shareholders might be disappointed.
• Ample free cash flow to support a more progressive capital return policy. Our projection shows that its net cash position should amount to Won718tr, or 40% of its market capitalization, by year-end 2027 and Won1,358tr by year-end 2028. We expect it to generate total FCF of Won1,434tr for 2026-28E, so its balance sheet should have ample cash unless the company returns far more cash to shareholders.
• More cash dividends than share buybacks. While SK Hynix’s capital return is more skewed toward share buybacks/cancellations, we expect Samsung’s capital return to consist more of cash dividends than share buybacks. This is partly because Samsung Life (032830KS, not rated) and Samsung F&M (000810KS, not rated) are forced to trim their stakes in SEC under local regulations in the event of significant share retirements by SEC.

What now

• Memory market outlook remains bright. Samsung’s significant cash position could hurt its ROE; accordingly, we see significant upside in its capital returns over the next two years. We believe that its capital return policy should improve steadily over time. The stock is trading at 2x ex-cash 2027E EPS. Outperform.

Shares fell as much as 2.6% in post-market trading after the announcement due to a lack of clarity on how much stock Samsung would repurchase and cancel. Some analysts had anticipated total returns of around 150 trillion won.

Kim Minji, a portfolio manager at Must Asset Management, explained that “some investors have recently expected up to 150 trillion won of shareholder returns, which explains the post-market share action.”

Kang DaeKwun, chief executive officer at Life Asset Management, held views similar to those of Must Asset Management’s Kim, saying the announcement underwhelmed expectations:

• After a local media report that the size of the shareholder return would be up to 150 trillion won, the announcement of up to 110 trillion won is triggering a selloff.
• The announcement met market expectations because Samsung kept its promise to return 50% of free cash flow to shareholders.
• While the market’s attention is on the size of the shareholder return, what is more important is the supply of shares.
• While US Big Tech companies are issuing new shares, South Korea is seeing a lower supply of shares thanks to large-scale shareholder return programs.

Announcements from SK Hynix and Samsung this week show that the management teams of the world’s top memory-chip companies are concerned that momentum in the space has completely evaporated.

“The smart money is moving on,” said Alec Young, chief investment strategist at MoneyFlows, a quant-research firm. “The fact that they have given up a lot of their recent bounce in just a couple days shows that there are a lot of weak hands.”

SanDisk and Western Digital have fallen more than 30% from their peaks, while Micron and Seagate are down roughly 20%, signaling that momentum investors are rotating into other trades, such as the materials and energy stocks we pointed out earlier in the week (read here).

Authored by Adam Dick via RPI

The United States government minted its final penny in November of 2025. This came after fiat money inflation succeeded in depriving pennies of nearly all their value. Pennies are still circulating, but it is increasingly common for stores to round cost totals to avoid giving pennies in change.

Also, people seeing that the metal content of their pennies is worth more than the face value are deciding that it is better to store pennies in a jar than to spend them.

The same issues that caused the US government to give up on pennies may soon encourage it to make a major change in regard to nickels.

In an August of 2025 article, I noted that each nickel valued at five cents was costing almost 14 cents to produce. What would the government do in regard to nickels? I suggested two likely options:

The writing seems to be on the wall for nickels. As their metallic value and production costs further and further exceed their face value, there will be more pressure to make changes in nickels’ composition to significantly reduce their cost of production.

Alternatively, the government may, as is being done with the penny, just stop making new nickels.

With penny production ended, it looks like nickel production may soon have a shakeup as well, though one that could buy nickels some time.

Two different versions of the Common Cents Act passed this summer, one in the United States House of Representatives (HR 3074) and the other in the Senate (S 1525).

Both legislative bodies will need to agree on the same bill before it can be sent on to the president for consideration.

Something the two bills have in common is permitting changing the composition of nickels from 75 percent copper and 25 percent nickel to portions to be determined of zinc inside and nickel outside.

The bills specify the composition change must reduce the cost of production of the coins and, “to the greatest extent practicable” have “a minimal adverse impact on machines designed to accept coins.“

Such a change for nickels would mirror what happened in the early 1980s with pennies, when newly minted pennies started being 97.5 percent zinc instead of the prior 95 percent copper. The resulting cost savings helped keep penny production going for over forty more years.

Will the US government keep minting nickels for another 40-plus years, or will inflation be so strong that the government much sooner sends the nickel off to the same fate the penny met last year?

In what can only be described as a stunning failure of state and local policy and leadership, Los Angeles County recorded its highest tally of flea-borne typhus cases in 2025, confirming 220 diagnoses, up from 187 the year before, according to the county’s Department of Public Health. Almost nine in ten of those patients ended up hospitalized. Fleas that feed on infected rats, opossums, and other small mammals carry the bacteria behind the disease to humans, and Los Angeles has watched the case count climb for years. The 2025 total marks the sharpest jump yet.

Dr. Dean Winslow has practiced infectious disease medicine for fifty years. He taught at Stanford, ran COVID-19 testing programs for the federal government, and served as President Trump’s 2017 nominee for assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. Asked whether a typhus outbreak in one of the wealthiest counties in America points to a broader failure in public health and sanitation, Winslow gave a one-word answer. “Absolutely,” he told the Daily Signal.

“It’s largely an issue of … people living in just horrible conditions in close proximity to rats,” Winslow said, naming rodents as the primary vector for the infection’s spread.

The conditions track with the county’s homelessness numbers. Homelessness in LA County rose 3.3% over the past year, and in the city of Los Angeles itself the figure climbed 7.9%, according to data from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. Winslow said encampments put residents at heightened risk given their proximity to rats, though he cautioned the problem extends beyond encampments alone.

Asked what he would tell city officials, Winslow said the priority should be to “get a handle again on rat control issues.”

That task has gotten harder since 2020, when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1788 into law, restricting the use of four rodenticides over concerns about their effects on mountain lions and other wildlife. Winslow pointed to the restrictions as one likely culprit behind the county’s swelling rat population, since pest-control operators have shifted toward traps and less potent methods in response. “Those may be two reasons why … the rat population is out of control [in LA],” he said.

The county’s own public health guidance seems to put the burden of prevention on residents, telling them to keep pets on flea-control products, avoid stray animals, clear yard debris, secure trash in tightly lidded containers, and report rodents or opossums to animal control. Mayor Karen Bass’s office did not respond to the Daily Signal’s request for comment.

Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, examined the county’s internal records for City Journal. His team filed public records requests and received a thousand pages of documents from the county health department. What those documents showed is a public health system bracing for outbreaks it had fallen behind on.

“This is about plague rats that have returned,” Rufo told Hugh Hewitt on the Salem News Channel. “So we did a story, we did FOIA, we got 1,000 pages of documents from the County Health Department in Los Angeles. And the picture that these documents painted was quite grim. You have a return of typhus, you have outbreaks of hantavirus, you have really a plethora of medieval diseases that are on the rise in LA.”

Rufo laid out two forces behind the outbreak. “And there are a couple of causes for this. The first is that the homeless encampments that are scattered, not just in Skid Row, but throughout the city, are the perfect breeding ground for rats. And so now there are millions of rats breeding under the streets of Los Angeles. And the County Health Department admits in these internal documents that they’re not ready for these outbreaks,” he continued. “And at the same time, you have California Governor Gavin Newsom in two separate pieces of legislation in recent years banning all of the most effective rodenticides, so rat poisons that can keep that population at bay. And when you put those ingredients together, you get something that experts predicted in LA seems powerless to stop, which is typhus, including three deaths from typhus in recent years.”

.@christopherrufo: “You have a return of typhus. You have outbreaks of hantavirus. You have a plethora of medieval diseases that are on the rise in L.A.

There are a couple of causes for this. The first is that the homeless encampments that are scattered, not just in Skid Row,… pic.twitter.com/bam0xbUkPb

— Manhattan Institute (@ManhattanInst) August 18, 2026

Three deaths and 220 hospitalization cases in a single year mark a policy failure in a county that absolutely has the resources to prevent it. Encampments stayed in place. Rodenticides came off the shelf. The health department knew what was coming and clearly could not (or would not) stop it. State and local officials built, permitted, and, in some cases, legislated the conditions that allowed the rat population to multiply beneath the streets of one of the wealthiest cities in America.

Authored by Victoria Friedman via The Epoch Times,

The United States will send a military hospital ship to Peru’s Pacific coast next year to help the country cope with the impact of the El Niño weather phenomenon.

Plans to send the hospital ship USNS Comfort to the northern Pacific coast of Peru in February 2027 were confirmed by U.S. Ambassador to Peru Bernie Navarro on Aug. 19 during a press conference at Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) in Miami, Florida.

Appearing alongside Peruvian Minister of Foreign Affairs Carlos Espá, Navarro told reporters that “one of the biggest things the United States is doing is bringing the military vessel Comfort, which we are going to bring in February.”

The ambassador said that February is when they believe the problem with El Niño will peak.

Espá told reporters that officials were already starting to develop a road map.

“We are concerned, but we’re not just concerned; we’re taking action,” Espá said.

“That’s why we’re so grateful to the ambassador, because thanks to him, the day before yesterday we met at Southern Command with all the U.S. agencies that will be assisting us, along with civil society and the business sector, to develop our roadmap.”

Following the press conference, Navarro said in a post on X:

“The United States will stand with Peru in facing El Niño. With a strategy focused on prevention rather than reaction, we will set an example for regional cooperation.”

El Niño is a warming of the Pacific Ocean near the equator that affects global weather patterns. According to meteorologists, it could soon equal or surpass the 1997 phenomenon, which caused damage from heat waves, heavy rains, floods, and forest fires.

Peru, which lies on the western coast of South America, has been subject to flooding this year as a result of the weather phenomenon.

Aid to South America

The planned deployment of USNS Comfort, which was already in Peru in 2018 and 2019, was announced in an earlier statement from the U.S. Embassy in Peru on Aug. 17 following the summit at SOUTHCOM.

The summit on disaster preparedness for El Niño was attended by the U.S. ambassador, Espá, SOUTHCOM, representatives from the U.S. and Peruvian governments, and individuals from academia and civil society.

The U.S. Embassy in Peru said in a statement that during the summit, Navarro highlighted that the United States has demonstrated its support for the South American country through its aid and assistance.

This includes the construction of 18 Regional Emergency Operations Centers; the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration training provided to its officials in emergency response and risk management; and scientific and medical cooperation, such as the upcoming arrival of the hospital ship.

The United States has also been sending increased humanitarian aid for earthquakes in Colombia and Venezuela.

SOUTHCOM said in an Aug. 17 post on X that U.S. assistance to Colombia for earthquake relief is ongoing.

“Today, a [U.S. Air Force] C-17 Globemaster III delivered more life-saving assistance and supplies from the [State Department’s] disaster response warehouse in Miami to Medellín for distribution to hard-hit communities in Colombia,” the command said.

“SOUTHCOM is actively supporting the [State Department-led] humanitarian response following the Aug. 10 earthquake in western Colombia. The United States stands in solidarity with the Colombian people during this crisis.”

Heavy Rain in Peru

Heavy rains attributed to El Niño caused flooding in Peru on Aug. 19, resulting in flooded homes, collapsed sewage services, and school closures in the capital, Lima.

Authorities also closed the main route to Machu Picchu, the ancient Inca citadel, due to the overflow of waterways.

There were also road closures from landslides in the southern regions ​of Arequipa and Moquegua.

Peruvian President Keiko Fujimori, who took office on July 28, said that tackling the impact of the weather phenomenon is a priority.

Ukrainian President Zelensky is once again under immense internal pressure, amid new corruption investigations which run straight through the presidential office as well as growing calls to finally hold elections despite the ongoing war with Russia.

Mykhailo Fedorov, the country’s popular young former defense minister and a longtime political ally of Zelensky – who was dismissed just last month largely as a result of tensions between him and army chief Oleksandr Syrskyi – stunned Kiev’s political establishment this week by issuing a video address urgently calling for a path to elections.

“We have to answer a fundamental question – how should a state function, if the war has lasted for years?” Fedorov said in the nine-minute-long YouTube video.

“Can Russia actually be entitled to define when Ukrainians can elect their authorities next time? I’m sure it’s not. Democracy can’t be Russia’s hostage,” he said.

Zelensky has long argued that martial law must stay in place, leaving no room for new elections based on the current constitution.

The 35-year-old Fedorov’s message was unexpected, and is being widely seen as a stab in the back to Zelensky. Al Jazeera has noted, for example:

Since he was fired, Fedorov has repeatedly emphasized his loyalty to Zelenskyy and refused to accept other jobs such as a presidential aide in charge of reforms.

He also claimed to have turned down a project with Palantir Technologies, a controversial, US-based software company that began collaborating with Ukraine’s military during Fedorov’s tenure.

But Federov is now calling for “a legal, safe and realistic mechanism” to restart a full democratic process “even in the conditions of a long war” – which flies directly in the face of the Zelensky government’s stance.

This marks the first time a high-level political ally of Zelensky has publicly pushed national elections since the war’s start.

It is also significant given Federov remains well-liked among the Ukrainian public. There was a lot of anger and confusion, including rare wartime protests, upon his mid-July dismissal.

His plea has sparked a little momentum:

Former foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba reportedly backed Fedorov’s idea, saying on Tuesday that elections “after war will not be more civilized, than during it.”

“We don’t know when [the war] ends. What if it lasts for another three years? We will be living under the political model that was formed in 2019, which has already been emotionally exhausted,” Kuleba, who helmed the Foreign Ministry in 2020-2024, was quoted by the Interfax Ukraine news agency as saying.

Back in December of last year, at a moment it was clear that the Ukrainians were backing away from Washington pressure to get to the negotiating table with Russia, President Trump had unleashed rare criticism on the Zelensky government.

Ukraine’s ousted defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov called for wartime elections in a video address, arguing the nation faced a crisis of governance, in the biggest internal challenge to ‌President Volodymyr Zelenskiy since Russia’s invasion https://t.co/DJRxjcWH6t pic.twitter.com/b72CVNvj4Q

— Reuters (@Reuters) August 19, 2026

“They haven’t had an election in a long time,” Trump said at the time to Politico. “You know, they talk about a democracy, but it gets to a point where it’s not a democracy anymore.”

But the reality is that American taxpayer funds, as well as US-made weaponry, continue to flow largely uninterrupted to Kiev. Trump had vowed to quickly wind down the war and achieve peace, but that has remained elusive.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Volunteer caregivers in the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta report that cat colonies are vanishing, dead animals are turning up cut apart, and birds such as pigeons and seagulls are being found half-devoured in the weeks since tens of thousands of migrants poured across the border from Morocco.

Nearly three weeks after the mass invasion, local reports describe cats displaced or missing, and carcasses discovered in disturbing conditions. Caregivers who have continued feeding the animals daily say the damage is already severe.

One volunteer administrator, identified as Merelo, told La Gaceta she has found “many dead cats, cut,” some missing half their body or pierced with a punch, along with mistreated animals.

? ÚLTIMA HORA | Aparecen gatos masacrados y palomas y gaviotas devoradas en Ceuta tras la invasión migratoria: «Están acabando con las colonias»

Por Unai Cano (@unaicano10)https://t.co/JuDyccN0wf

— LA GACETA (@gaceta_es) August 19, 2026

She has also located pigeons and seagulls that were half-eaten, though she said she did not personally witness anyone consuming them.

“When the people entered, the cats left their habitat, as happens in any natural space,” she explained. Merelo noted that Muslims traditionally show respect for cats, but among the new arrivals are people of sub-Saharan origin from various backgrounds.

The same pattern of disappearance is detailed in an account published by El Faro de Ceuta. Author Ángel Ruiz, writing in support of the volunteer caregivers, stated that the harm caused to the cat colonies “is great and, in many cases, irreparable.”

Cats have left areas now occupied by migrants. “It can be said clearly that cats are missing. Where are they? As of today, no one knows,” the caregivers summarize.

Affected sites include the area near the desalination plant, which caregivers describe as a disaster after occupation made it uninhabitable for the territorial animals. The same has happened in Huerta Téllez, Carmelitas, Calle Goya, and the neighborhoods of Príncipe, Sidi Embarek, and Punta Blanca, now turned into improvised settlements.

The volunteers are calling for the city government and central authorities to provide provisional housing outside the urban core so migrants stop occupying spaces that belong to the city’s community animals, and for immediate eviction of unauthorized camps.

Desaparecen gatos de las colonias felinas de Ceuta como consecuencia de la invasión https://t.co/sFldDUnaUY

— Pablo Haro Urquízar (@pabloharour) August 19, 2026

The animal reports fit a pattern repeatedly documented in other places hit by rapid, large-scale irregular migration.

In British cities, migrants have been filmed hunting pigeons with fishing rods and bare hands in public streets.

Similar clips have shown people catching and butchering swans and ducks in the UK and Ireland.

In one case a Nigerian migrant was caught cooking a cat in a public park next to a children’s playground.

In Springfield, Ohio, the city manager acknowledged hearing reports that Haitian migrants were eating pets.

These incidents are not isolated curiosities; they surface with depressing regularity where cultural norms around animal welfare, public space, and food sources collide with sudden demographic change that authorities refuse to control.

This is the latest chapter in the chaos that has gripped Ceuta since the late-July avalanche. Estimates of the initial crossing ranged into the tens of thousands – figures comparable to a large share of the enclave’s roughly 84,000 residents – many of them young men who swam or climbed around the border.

Thousands have remained. Reception capacity collapsed. Beaches and open spaces are now filled with shacks, garbage, and human waste. Children’s parks were left smeared in feces.

Reports of sexual assaults have mounted, including cases involving minors. Spanish mothers have been filmed weeping in the streets, packing children off to the mainland, and describing daily fear of leaving home without protection.

We also now have reports from local police of migrants dragging women off the streets, taking them into the surrounding mountainous territory and gang raping them.

Spanish authorities have deployed extra police and troops at points, yet the underlying policy of managed openness continues.

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