One of the co-authors of California’s controversial ‘one-time’ tax on billionaires appeared to suggest that the levy could extend beyond a single imposition.

Marxist economics professor Emmanuel Saez, who hails from France, made the comment during a Tuesday debate against economist Arthur Laffer at the University of California, Berkeley.

“I don’t think it’s going to be a one-time tax. Because you can’t surprise billionaires more than once,” Saez said. “Even then, maybe some of them were expecting something like this. So, it’s going to be a debate about this time, you know, a permanent wealth tax at a low rate that’s going to last for a number of years.”

Watch the entire debate below:

The radical tax pushed by the far-left Service Employees International Union–United Healthcare Workers West would slap California residents with a punishing one-time 5% levy on anyone with assets over $1 billion.

The proposal has reverberated through Silicon Valley, where several high-profile figures have already established residency elsewhere. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have moved to Florida, drawn by its more favorable business and tax environment, while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg purchased a $150 million mansion in Miami. This week, Bloomberg reported that Palantir CEO Alex Karp scooped up a Miami-area mansion for $46 million, while the company itself has recently relocated from Denver to Florida.

Even Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder, prominent Democrat donor, and longtime buddy of convicted schrodinger’s pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, has publicly criticized the proposal, describing California’s wealth tax tax as a “horrendous idea” that would hasten the departure of tech founders and executives from the state.

California is not alone among Democrat-leaning states experiencing such outflows. This week, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, a longtime backer of liberal causes, announced his relocation from Washington state to Miami, Florida, shortly after state legislators advanced a bill imposing a tax on residents earning more than $1 million annually.

“We have moved to Miami for our next adventure together. We are enjoying the sunshine of South Florida and its allure to our kids on the East Coast as they raise families of their own,” he wrote in a Linkedin post.

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

The commodity supercycle thesis is everywhere right now. Bank of America’s Michael Hartnett, one of the most widely read strategists on Wall Street, recently declared “commodities the biggest trade of the next five years,” anchoring the call on deglobalization, chronic capital underinvestment, and a world drifting away from dollar dominance. As is often the case, the narrative is extremely compelling. However, it’s also internally contradictory in ways that most investors aren’t stopping to examine.

After three decades of managing money, I have learned to be THE most skeptical of the trades that feel the most inevitable. That skepticism isn’t contrarianism for its own sake, but rather the recognition that when a thesis achieves consensus, the crowd has usually already priced the easy part of the move, and the hard part is what comes next. The commodity supercycle argument has real structural legs. But it also carries a reflexivity problem, a dollar mechanics problem, and a catastrophist assumption problem that, taken together, make the clean “go long commodities” conclusion far messier than the headline suggests.

Let’s work through each one carefully, and as always, with the data.

The Reflexivity Problem: When the Trade Defeats Itself

The most straightforward critique of any commodity supercycle thesis is that a sustained commodity rally is, by definition, inflationary. And sustained inflation is demand destruction. Before we get to the counterarguments (there are legitimate ones), it’s worth mapping out the feedback loop precisely, because the mechanism is more complex than the simple “inflation is bad for growth” headline suggests.

Commodity bulls offer a legitimate counterargument here. First, they distinguish between demand-pull inflation, where a hot economy bids up prices, and supply-constrained inflation. The latter is where chronic underinvestment means the world can’t produce enough regardless of demand levels. Hartnett’s case leans heavily on the supply side, and that’s the more defensible version of the argument. A decade of ESG-driven capital withdrawal from energy and metals, combined with the shale revolution’s diminishing returns, has created real supply deficits in several commodity markets.

The data below illustrates the scale of that underinvestment. Global upstream oil and gas capital expenditure peaked around 2014 and remained roughly 40% below that level as recently as 2023, even as demand returned to pre-pandemic levels. That is a genuine structural story, and certainly is worth paying attention to.

But even granting the supply-side framing, the reflexivity problem doesn’t disappear. This is a point that is often forgotten in the “heat of the moment” of a profitable trade. The markets are not static, but dynamic, and, as the old saying goes, “high prices are a cure for high prices.” There are two reasons why that is true.

First, high commodity prices are a tax on growth by transferring wealth from consumers and manufacturers to producers. That transfer compresses the demand on which commodity producers depend. Governments and central banks respond asymmetrically to commodity inflation by releasing strategic reserves, imposing windfall taxes, or accelerating substitution. The 2022 oil spike is a perfect case study: WTI briefly hit $130 per barrel, the Biden administration released over 180 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and demand destruction combined with a Fed tightening cycle broke the trade within months of the initial spike.

Secondly, high prices bring more supply online. When prices rise, producers are incentivized to produce more products. When that increase in supply collides with the collapse in demand, the cycle reverses quickly due to the supply glut. As shown in the chart below, the commodity market is notorious for booms and busts precisely because of this.

The 2022 episode compressed in real time what would normally take years to play out, but we also saw a similar episode from 2000 to 2007, as China consumed commodities in a push to rapidly grow its economy. That episode crashed in 2008 as the Financial Crisis crushed global demand. The policy/producer response isn’t hypothetical; it’s a documented reflex, and the more dramatic the commodity rally, the more certain the policy response becomes.

The Dollar Contradiction at the Heart of the Thesis

Here’s the fault line that most commodity bulls don’t address directly, and it’s the one I find most analytically significant: virtually all commodities are priced and settled in U.S. dollars in global markets. That’s not incidental; it’s the structural backbone of the petrodollar system that has anchored dollar demand since the 1970s. When oil prices rise, petrodollar recycling intensifies. Commodity exporters accumulate dollar surpluses and recycle them into U.S. Treasuries and dollar-denominated assets (including U.S. equities, gold, and other commodities). More commodity volume at higher prices means more dollar-denominated transactions, more dollar liquidity needs, and more dollar reserves held by commodity-importing nations.

A commodity supercycle, properly understood, is structurally dollar-supportive, not dollar-negative. As shown, many point to the decline in the US dollar’s “share” of global foreign exchange reserves as “proof” of its declining dominance.

The chart above tells a story the catastrophist crowd loves to cite, and they’re not wrong that the dollar’s reserve share has declined from its 2000 peak of roughly 71%. But look carefully at the actual level: as of late 2024, the dollar still accounts for approximately 57-58% of global reserves. The next closest competitor, the euro, sits around 20%. The Chinese yuan, despite years of de-dollarization rhetoric, accounts for less than 3%. The decline is real, but only because the Euro did not exist before 1999, and the Yuan only became accepted for trade on a limited basis a few years ago. However, a crisis it is not, and a commodity cycle only strengthens the dollar position.

This creates a direct contradiction with the other major pillar of the commodity bull narrative: the dollar debasement story. If the thesis requires dollar weakness to fully materialize, and many versions of it explicitly do, then a successful commodity cycle works against that by generating incremental dollar demand. The two arguments pull in opposite directions, and that tension is almost never acknowledged in the thesis presentations.

The only scenario in which both the commodity bull and the dollar bear cases work simultaneously is one in which U.S. fiscal excess debases the dollar faster than commodity-driven dollar demand can offset it. That requires a genuine crisis of fiscal confidence, a level of sovereign stress that isn’t currently visible and isn’t probable within a five-year investment horizon. Yes, the U.S. deficit is running approximately $1.8 to $2 trillion annually, interest expense has eclipsed defense spending, and the CBO projects no credible stabilization path under current policy. That is a real long-run problem over the next 30-50 years. But it’s not a five-year catalyst.

The China Problem: No Replacement for the Original Engine

China is the most critical lynchpin to the commodity supercycle. The 2000s commodity supercycle, the one this thesis is implicitly invoking as its template, was not primarily a supply story. It was a demand shock of historic proportions, and it had a name: China’s urbanization and industrialization. Between 2000 and 2012, China accounted for roughly half of all incremental global demand growth for steel, copper, aluminum, and coal. Its share of global iron ore consumption grew from under 20% to over 60% in that same period. That’s not a supply-deficit story. That’s a billion people building cities that no one lived in, which have now become an economic anchor.

That engine is now structurally impaired, and the table below illustrates why the India- and emerging-market “replacement demand” narrative falls significantly short of the original.

India’s commodity demand growth is real, and the broader emerging market infrastructure buildout adds genuine incremental demand. But there’s no single country or bloc that replicates the concentrated, high-velocity demand shock that China delivered between 2000 and 2012. The 2000s supercycle had a demand engine of historic scale running underneath it. Hartnett’s version relies on supply-side logic. In the absence of a comparably powerful demand driver, the supply/demand imbalance will not be as significant.

Meanwhile, as noted, China’s property sector collapse has removed the world’s single largest commodity demand driver. At its peak, Chinese real estate accounted for roughly 25-30% of GDP when the full construction supply chain is included. That’s not recovering in five years. The commodity demand that China generated during its construction boom was effectively borrowed from the future. Now that the borrowed “future” is arriving, it came as a demand vacuum.

Tail Risk Dressed as Base Case: The Catastrophist Problem

The “dollar demise / U.S. asset exodus / bipolar world” framing has been a persistent feature of bearish macro commentary since at least 2009. Every round of quantitative easing was supposed to be the moment dollar credibility broke. Every geopolitical fracture, the European debt crisis, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the U.S. credit downgrade, and the rise of the BRICS payment alternatives, was supposed to accelerate de-dollarization beyond the margin.

None of it happened on the timeline or at the magnitude the catastrophist crowd predicted. And yet the narrative keeps resurfacing and gets refreshed with new catalysts because the old narrative failed. That is why those castraphosists always have a key statement: “just not yet.”

The table above makes a straightforward point. In every major crisis of the past 20 years, the world’s response has been to buy dollars, not sell them. The de-dollarization that Hartnett and others embed in their commodity bull thesis requires the world to do the opposite. Rather, the world would shift away from dollar-denominated reserves and transactions in a sustained, structural way. There’s no evidence that’s happening at the pace or scale the narrative requires.

This doesn’t mean the dollar is invulnerable. The fiscal trajectory is genuinely concerning over a multi-decade horizon. A term premium reset in U.S. Treasuries is already underway, driven by foreign buyers demanding more compensation for duration risk. These are real and worth monitoring. But they’re 10 to 15-year dynamics, not five-year catalysts. Hartnett is packaging a legitimate long-run concern as an imminent trade driver, and that’s where the analytical rigor slips.

What This Means for Investors

I want to be precise about what I’m arguing and what I’m not. I’m not saying commodities are a bad investment or that the structural supply-deficit case is wrong; it’s not. Energy, select industrial metals, and agricultural commodities face real, medium-term supply constraints. Those constraints should support prices above the levels they traded at in the 2010s deflationary decade. The capex destruction of the prior cycle created a genuine deficit. That deficit will take years to close, and that story is worth holding exposure to in a diversified portfolio.

What I’m arguing is that the clean, multi-year commodity supercycle narrative, particularly the version built on dollar collapse and a wholesale shift away from U.S. assets, overstates the probability of its own enabling conditions. And more importantly, it contains a logical fault line: the commodity supercycle itself is dollar-supportive, not dollar-negative. The two main pillars of the thesis pull in opposite directions.

But What About The AI Boom?

Here is the real question. Can the artificial intelligence infrastructure boom replace China’s urbanization as the demand engine underneath a new commodity supercycle? The short answer is no, and understanding why clarifies exactly what kind of commodity opportunity we’re actually dealing with.

AI infrastructure does generate real commodity demand. Data centers require significant copper for power distribution and cooling systems. The grid expansion needed to support hyperscaler compute loads is driving demand for steel, aluminum, and transformers. Natural gas and nuclear power are being positioned as the baseload energy sources for facilities that can’t tolerate renewable intermittency. Goldman Sachs estimated that data center power demand could grow by roughly 160% by 2030, a figure worth taking seriously. Copper in particular has a legitimate AI demand tailwind, and uranium’s renaissance as a clean baseload energy source is directly tied to this infrastructure buildout.

But here’s where the China comparison breaks down completely. China’s urbanization moved roughly 500 million people from subsistence agriculture into cities over 20 years. It required building entire urban ecosystems. That boom required everything from roads and bridges to apartment towers, factories, ports, and railways. All scratch, simultaneously, across every commodity category at once. That was broad-based, high-intensity demand across iron ore, coal, copper, aluminum, cement, and energy, running in parallel. A true commodity supercycle requires that kind of breadth. AI infrastructure demand is concentrated almost entirely in copper and electricity. It doesn’t move the needle on iron ore, agricultural commodities, coal, or the dozens of other categories that a genuine supercycle requires.

There’s an irony here that rarely gets discussed.

“AI is simultaneously the most compelling new source of commodity demand and one of the most powerful long-run deflationary forces for commodity consumption.“

AI-driven efficiency gains in manufacturing, logistics, energy management, and precision agriculture reduce the per-unit economic output intensity of commodities. Predictive maintenance reduces equipment replacement cycles. Smart grid management reduces transmission losses. The same technology driving data center copper demand is also optimizing the systems that consume commodities everywhere else in the economy. Over a five-year horizon, those efficiency gains compound. The net commodity impact of the AI revolution is almost certainly positive. However, it is far more modest than the bull case narrative implies.

Conclusion

The highest probability scenario, a structurally elevated commodity price floor with significant cyclical volatility, doesn’t support a set-it-and-forget-it long commodity position. It supports tactical, rules-based exposure management. The investors who generated the most alpha during the 2000s commodity bull weren’t the ones who correctly read the structural thesis in 2001 and held through 2008. They were the ones who managed position sizes through the cyclical interruptions and had predefined frameworks for when to add and when to reduce.

That discipline is exactly what the current “biggest trade of the next five years” framing discourages. When a thesis gets packaged as a multi-year certainty, it creates complacency about the cyclical risks embedded in the trade. Those risks — recession-driven demand destruction, Fed policy response, dollar strength in stress events — are precisely the ones that cause the most damage to investors who sized positions based on narrative conviction rather than risk-adjusted analysis.

Inflation is reshaping modern dating by making romantic outings more expensive and forcing many singles to be more intentional about how they spend, according to a new study from DealSeek. 

Rising costs are affecting how often people go out, with 71% of singles saying dating is more expensive than it was a year ago and 40% saying they are going on fewer dates because of it. For many people, paying for transportation, meals, drinks, entertainment, and other date-related expenses has become harder to justify as everyday living costs continue to rise.

That financial pressure is changing expectations around first dates. Most singles now prefer keeping first dates relatively inexpensive, with 57% saying they want to spend $75 or less and 39% preferring to stay under $50. Only 8% are willing to spend more than $150. Rather than choosing expensive dinners or elaborate nights out, many people are opting for lower-cost activities like coffee dates, walks, park outings, community events, or discounted entertainment options that feel more practical.

Many singles are also becoming more proactive about saving money while dating. Around 37% said they suggest free activities for dates, while 30% actively search for discounts or deals before making plans. These habits show how dating is becoming less centered on extravagant gestures and more focused on spending time together in affordable ways.

The DealSeek report writes that financial responsibility is increasingly viewed as an attractive trait. About half of singles said they appreciate partners who suggest inexpensive date ideas, while 49% said being open about budgeting is appealing. Even using coupons is seen positively by 41% of respondents. These responses suggest that being practical with money is becoming more valued in relationships.

At the same time, irresponsible spending habits are seen as major red flags. Around 78% of singles said bragging about money is unattractive, 61% said overspending is a turnoff, and 69% dislike people who complain about finances while continuing to spend recklessly. Many people appear to value financial maturity over flashy displays of wealth.

Money concerns are also shaping dating decisions in deeper ways. Nearly half of respondents, 47%, admitted they have tried dating someone who earns more than they do. Meanwhile, 53% said they have misrepresented their financial situation while dating, and 42% said they have stopped seeing someone because of financial issues. Dating profiles are reflecting these changing attitudes as well, with 61% of people finding profiles that mention simple, low-cost hobbies more attractive than profiles focused on career ambition or high-paying jobs.

Overall, dating is becoming more practical as people adjust to higher costs. Instead of trying to impress others through expensive dates or displays of wealth, many singles are placing greater value on honesty, affordability, and financial responsibility.

Via the Brownstone Institute,

Hollywood loves a good sequel and so does politics and pharmaceutical development. 

Since Covid, there have been several attempted disease scares – Mpox, Swine flu, Bird flu, Chikungunya, Measles – but nothing has really caught the attention of audiences like the new Hantavirus frenzy. 

Today’s evidence comes from DRUDGE REPORT: global effort to stop the spread. Is “flatten the curve” next?

Let’s remember how this began last year, with of course, a hantavirus death in the family of one of America’s most beloved Hollywood actors. It was Betsy Arakawa, Gene Hackman’s wife, who died February 12, 2025, from apparent hantavirus infection from rodents in the home. Terrifying image. 

At that point, no regular person had ever heard of such a disease. There is a reason. It’s rare and human-to-human spread is nearly unknown. Strange that it would hit the wife of the appropriately named Gene Hackman (get it?), leading man of the prescient 1998 movie Enemy of the State. 

Next up we have a reprise of the Plague Ship motif. Like the Diamond Princess, it is a cruise ship, the MV Hondius operated by Oceanwide Expeditions with 147 passengers, departing from Argentina and now anchored off Cape Verde, West Africa. 

It was headed to the Canary Islands when three people died, two with lab-confirmed hantavirus. No port would allow the ship to dock. With the assistance of rescue boats, the dead have been carefully removed by workers in hazmats and masks.

A flight attendant who came in contact with a dead body is now hospitalized and in rough condition, suggesting that even coming close to a person with hantavirus is risky stuff. No one can figure out how this is even possible. So mysterious, so unusual, so terrifying, just like the movie Contagion. 

This fits with the theory of Drs. Fauci and Morens that we need not worry about lab-created pathogens when animal-to-human spillover is becoming more common. This is why, they wrote in August 2020, that we must commence to “rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.”

Ready to opine for the press is the World Health Organization’s Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, she of Stanford University pedigree, now widely quoted as the go-to authority. 

You might remember Dr. Kerkhove from the original cast of the Covid production. It was she who wrote the WHO’s report to the world following the February 2020 junket to Wuhan. (We know this from the metadata of the report, which she failed to cleanse in the rush to publication.) 

“Achieving China’s exceptional coverage with and adherence to these containment measures,” she wrote of the CCP’s extreme lockdowns, “has only been possible due to the deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action in the face of this common threat. At a community level this is reflected in the remarkable solidarity of provinces and cities in support of the most vulnerable populations and communities.”

Many close observers credit Kerkhove’s report with inspiring the worldwide lockdown of all nations but four in the following weeks. She still works at the WHO. Hardly anyone remembers any of this. There is no mechanism in place for her to be held to account for her role. 

There is no known cure but a vaccine is in development by Moderna based on the mRNA platform. 

As a result, Moderna’s stock, down dramatically from its highs, is now starting to recover. It is now up 100 percent year over year. The buy signal is strong with this one.

Looking back at the Covid prequel, there was always a flaw in the coronavirus caper, namely its short period of latency, roughly that of a cold or flu. You are infectious for a few days without symptoms while you pass it on. A genuine disease panic needs a longer period of latency. You need to be infected for weeks while spreading it far and wide. 

Why is this? Because every infectious disease confronts the logic of survival. A smart virus does not kill its hosts – it needs them to infect others – but a dumb one does, which is why dumb viruses are not good candidates for pandemics. 

This persistent trade-off between severity and prevalence can only be gamed by a long period of latency. That’s extremely rare and not even lab-created viruses manage this balancing act well. 

As it turns out, this hantavirus does have a very long period of latency, we are assured by the Harvard School of Public Health. It has issued a pronouncement: “The incubation period – the time between when a person is infected and when they begin to experience symptoms – is usually in the range of two to three weeks, but may be as long as eight weeks.”

Two months! Imagine that. Here we might finally have our candidate for the silent killer about which Deborah Birx fantasized during the last iteration of this story.

Keep in mind that no high institution in the US has repudiated lockdowns, even if two-thirds of the public believes they were pointlessly damaging. The call for Covid Justice has now 37,300 signatures but not enough to cause the Senate, House, or any other legislative body to speak clearly that this will never be tolerated again. 

To this day, the plan of the World Health Organization – which is already practicing for the next pandemic – is to push for lockdowns until vaccination in the event of a new disease scare. “Every country should apply non-pharmaceutical measures systematically and rigorously at the scale the epidemiological situation requires,” they say. 

Meanwhile, the Biden plan was for a 130-day lockdown in the event of a new pandemic. 

There are few mechanisms in place in any country to prevent this from happening. There are good people in government who would oppose this with strong conviction but will they even be asked their opinions? Or does this all occur with any obvious evidence of democratic volition? 

Who precisely is directing and producing this sequel? No one knows for sure. Will it be a box office hit like the last time or only have a limited release to test market interest? All the ingredients are here for an Academy Award: rodents, long latency, spread through casual contact with the dead, workers in hazmat suits, no known cure, a vaccine in rushed development. 

The real beauty of disease panic is that it has broad audience appeal and crosses partisan lines. National Review is all in already, as it was with Covid, and surely The Nation will join the effort in days. 

These are well-worn plot devices and sequels are rarely as compelling or profitable as the original. But when one is out of other ideas – and the public clamor to indict Fauci grows by the hour – it’s always worth a shot. 

Recent trading competitions suggest large language models are still unreliable portfolio managers, according to Bloomberg.

Tests involving models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI have often delivered underwhelming results: many lost money, traded excessively, and made erratic decisions despite receiving identical prompts. In several cases, models appeared unable to stick to coherent strategies for more than a few trading sessions.

Bloomberg writes that one of the clearest examples came from Alpha Arena, a competition created by startup Nof1. Eight models were each given $10,000 and asked to trade U.S. tech stocks over a two-week period using different strategies, including defensive approaches and leveraged bets. Across four competitions, the models collectively lost roughly a third of their capital, and only six of 32 outcomes ended in profit.

The gap in behavior was striking: xAI’s Grok 4.20 made just 158 trades in one contest, while Alibaba Group’s Qwen executed 1,418 under the exact same prompt.

The experiments reflect growing interest in whether generative AI can eventually outperform traditional fund managers. Wall Street firms including JPMorgan Chase and Balyasny Asset Management already rely on AI for research, fraud detection, and internal analysis, but they have largely stopped short of handing over actual investment decisions. As Nof1 founder Jay Azhang put it, current models still struggle with basics like “position sizing, timing, signal weighting and overtrading.”

That broader pattern has shown up elsewhere too. Research blog Flat Circle tracked 11 public AI trading competitions and found that while every event produced at least one profitable model, only two generated a profitable median return — suggesting most bots still underperform more often than not. Azhang was even more blunt about the state of autonomous trading: giving an LLM money and letting it invest independently “isn’t a thing yet.”

Some firms are still betting that the technology improves with better tools and tighter guardrails. Intelligent Alpha, for example, runs an AI-driven fund that combines LLMs with earnings transcripts, analyst forecasts, corporate filings, macroeconomic indicators, and web searches to make predictions. In late 2025, OpenAI’s ChatGPT correctly predicted the direction of earnings estimate revisions 68% of the time — its strongest showing so far.

Evaluating these systems remains difficult because traditional backtesting methods can be misleading: models may already have embedded knowledge of past market events, creating look-ahead bias. That has pushed more firms toward live-market experiments, where results so far suggest AI may be useful as an assistant — but not a replacement — for human traders.

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump said on May 8 that he has no plans to replace Marty Makary as commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

When asked by reporters outside the White House about Makary, Trump responded: “Nothing much, he’s doing fine,” without elaborating further.

Trump said he had seen reports suggesting the administration was planning to remove Makary from his role leading the FDA, but added that he knows “nothing about it.”

The president also rejected the notion that he would hire someone new to replace Makary.

Amid the media speculation, White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement to multiple news outlets that Trump “has assembled the most experienced and talented administration in history.”

Several media outlets, citing unnamed sources, on May 8 stated that the president intends to remove Makary after controversies surrounding abortion drug mifepristone.

A federal appeals court on May 1 blocked the mailing of mifepristone until the FDA can ensure the abortion drug is “safe and effective” for use in the United States. The Supreme Court later put the ruling on hold after pill maker Danco Laboratories requested an emergency stay.

Mifepristone has long been available to women after consulting with doctors. In 2023, federal authorities enabled access via mail and at pharmacies.

In its May 1 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit said mifepristone could not be shipped because the FDA “conceded it had failed to adequately study whether remotely prescribing mifepristone is safe.”

Susan B. Anthony (SBA) Pro-Life America had previously called for Makary’s removal, accusing him of being indifferent toward calls for stricter regulations on abortion drugs.

“FDA Commissioner Makary should be fired immediately. Indifference is completely unacceptable to millions of pro-life voters expecting the administration to act to save lives,” SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser said in a May 4 statement.

“More than 90,000 abortions occur each year just in states that protect babies in the law throughout all nine months of pregnancy—a direct result of Biden’s COVID-era mail-order abortion drug rule, which the Trump administration inexplicably allows to continue.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, ​which oversees the FDA, for comment.

Meanwhile, Dr. Vinay Prasad, the top vaccine official at the FDA, left the agency for a second time on April 30. Prasad served as head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) before resigning from the role in July 2025. He subsequently rejoined the agency two weeks later at the FDA’s request.

Katherine Szarama, who had been CBER’s deputy director, has been elevated to acting director of the center following Prasad’s departure, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Soaring expenses for raw materials and labor have delivered a blow to yet another longtime business, claiming Lammes Candies, a family-owned confectioner that has operated in the South for more than a century, FOX 7 Austin reports.

The Austin, Texas,-based company recently announced that it will begin an “orderly wind-down of operations” after 141 years of family ownership, according to a statement posted to its Facebook page.

“This was not an easy decision,” the candy company wrote. “Lammes Candies has been more than a business – it has been a family legacy spanning generations.”

“We’ve been so honored to be part of your celebrations and your sweetest moments,” the company wrote in a separate post. “Now we’re asking one last thing: savor every bite.”

Lana Schmidt, the company’s vice president, cited intensifying economic pressures for the closure in an interview with FOX 7 Austin.

“The economy, you know, with the raw materials going up, labor is going – it’s just everything is escalating,” a disheartened Schmidt said. “There’s not a huge margin in confections.”

Founded in 1885 after the Lamme family reacquired the business, the company built its reputation on pecan pralines and other handcrafted sweets.

“Throughout the years, my father bought it in its entirety, I think, in 1972. And so, he was in the fourth generation,” Schmidt said. “My brother and sister and I are the fifth generation. And back in that time, we had just like one, two retail stores. And then they grew it throughout Austin.”

“I think we’ve built a legacy for the community. I mean we had the first neon sign. I mean there are a lot of firsts with lamps in Austin. I know people are gonna miss this sweet treat, this tradition of theirs. And so we will miss the community,” she added.

Speaking to FOX 7 Austin, some longtime customers are heartbroken by the news.

“I first came here when I first moved to Austin. This was one of the first places I came to. I moved here about five years ago. And I came in because I saw that it was one of the oldest places in Austin. And I was like, I want to get in on that,” one customer told the local news outlet.

“I’ve never been here before. My mom told me when we moved over here about how, when she was a kid, she used to go here a lot,” another customer said.

Summary

• US reportedly struck 4 Iranian oil tankers attempting to traverse the Strait

• Qatari LNG Tanker entered the Strait for first time since start of war

• US continues to await a formal response from Tehran on a proposal aimed at ending the war

The odds of a permanent peace deal by the end of May have faded notably (now just 25%)…

US Reportedly Struck 4 Iranian Oil Tankers Entering The Strait

Multiple accounts across social media are reporting that four tankers were apparently struck or disabled by the U.S. forces near Iran’s Jask area. 

@EGYOSINT notes that satellite imagery shows one tanker on fire and extensive oil spills, including leaks from two tankers, with another spill detected about 7.4 kilometers from the anchorage site.

@Merrux confirmed that US forces hit an Iranian oil tanker near the port city of Bandar Jask last night.

The vessel is currently on fire. It remains unclear if other tankers were also hit, though smoke is rising from them. The tanker is visibly ablaze, there has been no response from Iran.

Presumably these are just more “love taps” and do not represent any threat to the so-called ‘ceasefire’.

Iran Keeps US Waiting On Formal Response To Peace Proposal

A state of relative calm prevailed around the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday, after days of sporadic flareups, as the Trump administration continues to await a formal response from Tehran on a U.S. proposal aimed at ending the war and reopening the Hormuz chokepoint, following last week’s clashes between Iranian and U.S. naval forces in the world’s most critical waterway.

As Times of Israel reports, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday that Washington expected a response within hours and President Donald Trump later said it would likely be submitted “tonight.”

But a day later, there was no sign of movement from Iran on the proposal, which would formally end the war before talks on more contentious issues, including the Iranian nuclear program.

With US President Donald Trump due to begin a long-awaited visit to China next week, there has been mounting pressure to draw a line under the conflict, which has thrown energy markets into turmoil and posed a growing threat to the world economy.

As Tehran kept Washington waiting for its response after saying Friday it was not paying attention to “deadlines,” the Islamic Republic’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called into question the reliability of the US leadership in a call with his Turkish counterpart.

“The recent escalation of tensions by American forces in the Persian Gulf and their numerous actions in violating the ceasefire have added to suspicions about the motivation and seriousness of the American side in the path of diplomacy,” he said, according to an Iranian account of the call published by the ISNA news agency.

While there were no official signs of a breakthrough in negotiations as of early Saturday morning, new ship data from the Hormuz area may suggest that positive developments are ahead. 

Qatari LNG Tanker Enters The Strait In First Since War

Bloomberg reporter Stephen Stapczynski wrote on X that an LNG tanker from Qatar is “attempting” to transit the Hormuz.

“If successful, this would be the first time Qatar has exported LNG out of the region since the Iran war began in late-Feb,” Stapczynski noted, adding, “The tanker says it is destined for Pakistan.”

BREAKING: Qatar is attempting to send an LNG shipment through the Strait of Hormuz 🇶🇦⚠️

If successful, this would be the first time Qatar has exported LNG out of the region since the Iran war began in late-Feb

The tanker says it is destined for Pakistan pic.twitter.com/JBHMq2RWpi

— Stephen Stapczynski (@SStapczynski) May 9, 2026

The tanker is fully loaded with LNG and is currently transiting the Hormuz chokepoint. We must point out that the ship did not sail through the Hormuz Island route. There is no word on whether Iran charged the vessel a transit fee, but Tehran allows ships from “friendly” nations, primarily China, India, and the UAE, to pass.

On Friday, UBS energy analyst Anna Kishmariya told clients that shipping flows through the Hormuz chokepoint remain very restricted and that the global oil market is getting tighter.

There is certainly urgency among the Trump administration and other nations to unfreeze Hormuz, as oil market insiders see a roughly one-month countdown to global energy chaos if the waterway remains blocked through this month.

Latest overnight headlines, courtesy of Bloomberg:

Ceasefire and Diplomatic Efforts

• The US is waiting for Iran’s response to Trump’s latest proposal to end the war, which suggests Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz while the US ends its blockade of Iranian ports over the next month

• Tehran’s response to the US proposal is “under review,” according to Foreign Ministry Spokesman Esmail Baghaei

• Trump has changed his approach to prioritize reopening the Strait of Hormuz at all costs while leaving nuclear and ballistic missile negotiations for later

Recent Military Clashes

• The US struck Iranian military targets on Thursday after Iran fired multiple missiles, drones and small boats at three US Navy destroyers in the Strait of Hormuz, with no US assets hit

• US forces targeted missile and drone launch sites and other military assets in Iran that were responsible for attacking the US warships

• The US “disabled” two unladen Iranian-flagged oil tankers, according to US officials

• Iran seized the tanker Ocean Koi in the Gulf of Oman, which appeared to be carrying Iranian oil

Hormuz

• The Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed to commercial shipping since Tuesday following the US-Iran clashes

• A Qatari LNG tanker, Al Kharaitiyat, is attempting to transit the strait, which would mark Qatar’s first export from the region since the war began

• Saudi Aramco and UAE’s Adnoc have managed to move some crude cargoes through the strait despite Iran’s effective closure of the waterway

Impacts

• The world has burned through oil inventories at record speed as the Iran war throttles flows from the Persian Gulf, eating into buffers that protect against supply shocks

• Chinese energy imports fell sharply in April, with crude cargoes dropping about 20% year-on-year to 38.47 million tons and gas falling about 13% to 8.42 million tons

• Global food prices climbed to their highest level in more than three years as the Iran war disrupted supply chains, with the UN food-commodity index gaining 1.6% in April

• Iran’s record internet blackout is taking a heavy toll on private businesses, with warnings it could lead to mass layoffs and closures

International Response

• The US imposed sanctions on three Chinese firms for providing satellite imagery to Iran, enabling its military strikes on American forces in the Middle East

• The UK will deploy HMS Dragon warship to the Middle East as part of planning for a European-led mission to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz once there’s a stable ceasefire

• Iran is ramping up trade with China via rail to bypass the US blockade, with cargo trains from Xi’an to Tehran increasing from one per week to one every three or four days

The Iranian government has for the first time officially weighed in on the health of new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, who was injured in the opening strikes of Trump’s Operation Epic Fury, which killed the younger Khamenei’s father and wife.

“A government official claimed Khamenei, who hasn’t been seen in public since that attack, is now in good health,” The Wall Street Journal writes Saturday.

He hasn’t been seen in public since the war began, and even official statements have been read aloud on state media broadcasts. There have since been conflict reports. However, according to the latest:

Yet the chief of protocol for the supreme leader’s office, Mozaher Hosseini, said on Friday that Khamenei is in “complete health,” stressing that he has only been “marginally injured” on his foot and lower back and hit by “a small piece of shrapnel had hit him behind the ear.”

“The enemy is spreading all kinds of rumors and false claims. They want to see him and find him, but people should be patient and not rush. He will speak to you when the time is right,” Hosseini told a crowd in Tehran.

Prior international reports suggested he was being treated for severe burns and that he could undergo surgery, and resorts to communicating commands to lower officials via low-tech means, including written and hand delivered messages, in order to avoid Israeli or US intelligence intercepting signals related to his whereabouts.

Regional and Gulf media have also summarized of the latest official Iranian description of the Ayatollah’s health, that “there were no indications of a serious deterioration in his condition.”

And, “According to Iranian media reports, the official stated that medical examinations confirmed Mojtaba Khamenei’s condition was completely stable. He added that the injury did not require complex surgery. Furthermore, he is undergoing only routine medical monitoring to ensure his well-being.”

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian revealed on Thursday that he for the first time recently held a meeting with Mojtaba Khamenei, at an undisclosed location, and that the encounter was a long and productive one. State media said it was two-and-a-half hours.

US intelligence assesses that Iran’s new supreme leader is playing a critical role in shaping war strategy alongside senior Iranian officials, according to multiple sources. https://t.co/Ejyo5tGipb pic.twitter.com/c4nfMMR25r

— CNN (@CNN) May 9, 2026

“What stood out more than any other topic in the meeting was the way of dealing, the type of outlook, and the humble and deeply friendly manner of conduct by the leader of the revolution,” Pezeshkian described. He characterized the new Ayatollah’s approach as “a model based on taking responsibility, being close to the people, and truly listening to issues and problems.”

Western officials and intelligence have all the while been seeking to assess just who is ultimately in charge of running the country. There have been reports of a growing split between the IRGC military apparatus and the Islamic Republic’s civilian leadership. However, none of these reports are confirmable, but it’s largely only guesswork by those far outside the country.

Authored by Jacob Burg & Jacki Thrapp via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours – the ALFstein files),

Apollo 11 astronauts reported seeing a “sizeable” object close to the moon with a “fairly bright light source” that they described as a “possible laser,” in a newly released post-mission crew debriefing from NASA.

That document, along with videos and images of unknown objects in airspace from nearly all corners of the globe, was included in newly released files from the Pentagon related to the U.S. government’s investigations into unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). The first tranche of files was released on May 8.

“As for my promise to you, the Department of War has released the first tranche of the UFO/UAP files to the Public for their review and study,” President Donald Trump wrote on social media Friday morning.

“With these new Documents and Videos, the people can decide for themselves, ‘WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?’ Have Fun and Enjoy!”

While the Pentagon had been increasingly declassifying various UFO and UAP files throughout the past decade, Trump threw the topic back into public focus when he suggested in February that a document release could be coming soon.

The first batch of released files includes FBI interviews and internal communications, State Department cables, NASA crew transcripts, and videos of potential UFOs.

Here are five highlights from a partial review of the new file release.

Moon Sightings

The newly released documents reveal that NASA astronauts encountered a series of unexplained phenomena during multiple Apollo missions.

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin reported witnessing a “fairly bright light source” which he described as a “possible laser” while in lunar orbit, according to a previously confidential crew debriefing of Apollo 11 taken on July 31, 1969.

The Apollo 12 flight crew observed two separate incidents of an “unidentified phenomenon” in November 1969.

Apollo 12 astronaut Alan L. Bean described observing particles of light “sailing off in space,” that looked as if they were “escaping the Moon.” Charles “Pete” Conrad made a separate observation of seeing floating debris outside the lunar module.

Apollo 17 astronauts reported three different unexplained events on three separate days of their 1972 mission.

Harrison “Jack” Schmitt said he observed a flash on the lunar surface north of the Grimaldi crater. He described it as a “thin streak of light.”

Schmitt experienced another unexplained event with Command Module Pilot Ronald Evans, as they observed “very bright particles or fragments” drifting and “tumbling” near the spacecraft.

“There’s a whole bunce (sic) of big ones on my window down there—just bright,” Schmitt said. “It looks like the Fourth of July out of Ron’s window.”

In a separate incident on the same Apollo 17 mission, Mission Commander Eugene A. Cernan said he experienced an intense, “imposing” light flashing between his eyes like it was a train headlight.

Amid those sightings, the astronauts took a photo of what appeared to be three dots in a triangular formation in the sky above the moon. NASA noted that while the image has been released previously, “there is no consensus about the nature of the anomaly.”

‘Eight-Pointed Star’

The Epoch Times reviewed all the videos included in the Pentagon’s initial UFO file release. Potentially the most striking video came from U.S. Central Command in 2013, which shows an aerial object that was described as “an eight-pointed star with arms of alternating length.”

The object appears to be hovering in the one-minute forty-six-second video.

U.S. Central Command reported another potential UFO that was filmed from an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform in 2022. The report described the object as a “possible missile” quickly moving across the field of view.

In a third video, another U.S. military infrared sensor films two bright objects that seemingly track across the sky in formation. The objects appear with high contrast against the sky’s backdrop.

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command submitted a video from 2024 to the Pentagon that was also filmed with an infrared sensor, tracking a potential UFO through an area containing multiple windmills.

FBI Probes Multi-Witness Sighting

The file dump included multiple heavily redacted FBI interview reports from a multi-witness sighting at an unknown U.S. testing facility in September 2023.

In one report, a woman describes a strange series of events that occurred one morning when she and several government contractors were working on a special project under restricted airspace.

While trying to enter a remote-controlled gate at the undisclosed U.S. testing facility, the gate “opened just a little and then closed on three separate tries” before finally opening on the fourth attempt.

The report said the gate had zero operational issues before or after the incident occurred.

As the woman’s vehicle drove through the gate entrance, she “looked up and saw a cigar-shaped object with an extremely bright light” anywhere between 500 and 3000 feet above the nearest treeline.

She described it as “metallic bronze in color” and the length of two to three Black Hawk helicopters “lined up nose to tail.” The woman and another unnamed contractor watched the object for five to 10 seconds before it disappeared, leaving no contrails.

The FBI included a composite sketch of the reported object.

These were not the only witnesses. The FBI interviewed a drone pilot operating near the same testing facility who also claimed to see the object, and other redacted witnesses driving towards the facility that day who saw it as well.

‘Cobalt Ray’ Telegram

One of the seemingly strangest documents seen thus far by The Epoch Times in the Pentagon’s initial UFO file release is an internal FBI memo from 1967, sent from the Bureau’s legal attaché in Mexico City to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

Marked as “classified SECRET,” the memo reproduces a telegram sent to Mexico’s Federal Security Police by a W.R. Hanawalt, who reportedly sent it from Harlingen, Texas, in December 1966.

Hanawalt tells of a strange technological object that he describes as a “laser ray, or cobalt ray” that is “self-enshrouding” and “similar in use to a cocoon around a silk worm.” He says the ray can enclose a person’s entire nervous system, allowing the operator to produce “visions of flying objects.”

“Breathing and heartbeat can be absolutely manipulated—your lie detector tests can be positively controlled without your knowledge,” Hanawalt writes, adding that the ray can manipulate a person’s five senses.

“They have infiltrated almost every business level,” he says, referring to those who operate the alleged technology.

“I have stated the possibility of premeditated murder from the standpoint of the operator, his vehicle and add to this the same conditions for the other vehicles involved. These are manipulated by the ‘rotten apples’ in the barrel of any Federal security arm, who are untouchable because of betrayal of Federal top secrets they have sworn to defend,” Hanawalt adds.

Other than the “SECRET” stamps on the document and barely legible handwritten notes, the only notation from the FBI is that the Bureau had no information in its files on Hanawalt.

‘Bright Light of Enormous Intensity’

The trove of files also included multiple State Department cables and documents.

In one cable, dated Jan. 31, 1994, an object was reportedly seen over Kazakhstan by Tajik air pilots, who described it as a “bright light of enormous intensity” that approached them from over the horizon.

“They watched the object for some forty minutes as it maneuvered in circles, corkscrews, and made 90-degree turns at rapid rates of speed and under very high [G-forces],” the cable said. “After some time, the object adopted a horizontal high-speed course and disappeared over the horizon.”

The captain took photos of the object with a pocket Olympus camera. Those photos were not included with the report.

In another State Department cable dated Jan. 28, 1985, a “high-altitude, high-speed aircraft” was observed over Papua New Guinea by the U.S. Embassy in Port Moresby.

Local residents reportedly became frightened by unidentified aerial objects flying overhead. The reports described “fast-moving objects with lights, contrails, and noise.”

A pilot reported seeing an aircraft on radar “flying south to north at high altitude and high speed.”

The State Department told Papua New Guinea’s National Intelligence Organization that it knew of no overflights of U.S. military B-52s, or U.S. aircraft in the area on the night of the reported incidents.