On September 4, the US Treasury unveiled sanctions against a Turkey-based bank and two of its subsidiaries, accusing them of moving tens of millions of dollars on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force and facilitating Tehran’s movement of funds across the international banking system. 

It did not take long for the Turkish government to sweep in and act to contain the damage and what some interpret as a national reputational hit, which was one of the opening salvoes in the Trump/Bessent ‘Economic D-Day’ and secondary sanctions (Operation Economic Outcast) targeting Tehran and entities still doing business with the Islamic Republic.

On Wednesday Turkey’s banking regulator has taken over most shareholder rights of the US-targeted bank – the Golden ⁠Global Yatirim Bankasi – through the country’s state deposit insurer, TMSF (Savings Deposit Insurance Fund).

Turkish media notes that “The decision gives the fund the authority to exercise the shareholder rights attached to the stakes, while specifically excluding dividend rights.”

The newly reassigned rights cover 99.98 percent of the shares in the bank, reports also detail.

Publicly available figures indicate that Golden Global Investment Bank is a small and young bank, having €498 million ($574.5 million) in total assets, and was only founded in 2019.

In the wake of the US action, US Ambassador to Turkey and Trump special envoy for the broader region Tom Barrack had sought to calm the Turkish government by saying Washington is only targeting specific financial institutions and this is not meant as a shot against Turkey itself.

“This designation is aimed at the conduct of one entity, not at a nation, not at a banking system, and not at an ally,” Barrack wrote on X.

He further declared it would be “a serious error” to interpret the measure as a judgment on the Turkish ally as a whole.

The country’s Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek had simply acknowledged last week that Ankara had taken note of US Treasury announcements – suggesting some kind of serious house cleaning could soon follow.

OFAC alleges the bank was created to help Iranian oil revenues reach Turkey from China, where exchangers converted the funds into cash and gold, and accuses it of opening correspondent banking to Iranian institutions through accounts under Quds Force control. There are reports saying the bank has officially rejected the charges against it.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

A Dutch ‘activist’ who climbed Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, sprayed it with “Zionist war criminal,” “Globalise the Intifada” and Hamas-style red triangles, then argued the graffiti didn’t count because it could be washed off, has walked out of Southwark Crown Court a free man.

The bill for cleaning the monument ran into thousands. The man who did it has escaped criminal charges.

Olax Outis, also known as Caspar San Giorgi, 39, defaced Churchill earlier this year while wearing a red boiler suit reading “I support Palestine Action.” Prosecutor Peter Ratliff told jurors he sprayed the words ‘Free Palestine’ and red triangles on the front, and ‘Never Again Is Now’ on the rear. On the plinth he scrawled ‘Globalise the Intifada,’ ‘Stop the Genocide’ and ‘Zionist war criminal,’ plus a Dutch line he later rendered as ‘The Hague sends their regards.’

UPDATE: The Dutch Palestine Action fan who vandalised Winston Churchill’s statue with slogans like “Globalise the Intifada” and red triangles was just found NOT GUILTY of criminal damage. This country’s legal system is a nasty joke. pic.twitter.com/HYmjUTnZGy

— Heidi Bachram (@HeidiBachram) September 15, 2026

A Greater London Authority heritage warden saw him doing it and called the police. Officers were there within two minutes. Specialist cleaners were not far behind. Court figures put the damage at £11,970 when he was first charged. Later reporting on the restoration bill listed more than £7,000, including police barriers at £612 plus VAT and an emergency clean and restore at £6,504 plus VAT.

He denied criminal damage. The paint was washable, he said. He was “sending a message to parliament.” He was “preventing a crime.” The jury agreed he was not guilty.

In the dock he was unrepentant. “I’m proud to be a citizen of The Hague,” he told them. “If I had a larger canvas and more time, I would have written if Keir Starmer doesn’t come to The Hague, The Hague will come for him. My wish is to see him on trial in The Hague.” On the verdict itself: “Whether you convict me or not is not too much of a concern for me. Whether I get acquitted, deported, imprisoned for years, I can be proud of having spoken about injustice and I have accounted for my actions. I will accept your judgement.”

‘It is pathetic! It is astonishing! I cannot believe the country we live in.’ @MartinDaubney fumes at confirmation that the man who painted ‘Free Palestine’ on the Chrurchill statue in Westminster being cleared of criminal damage. pic.twitter.com/t4pWNeXiu8

— GB News (@GBNEWS) September 15, 2026

He had already claimed the stunt online. He had come to Britain, he said, to “deface a statue of one of history’s most well-known war criminals, Winston Churchill.” Churchill, in his telling, was “the Keir Starmer of his time.”

Downing Street called the vandalism “completely abhorrent” in February and said Churchill was “a great Briton” who “must be held to account.” The Home Office called the vandals “a disgrace.” The Greater London Authority said it was “appalled.” Six months later a jury decided the spray cans did not amount to a crime.

‘Many people find it an abhorrent form of protest.’

Social policy analyst Dr Rakib Ehsan reacts to an activist being cleared of ‘desecrating’ the Winston Churchill outside of Parliament. pic.twitter.com/w8hNxroiDg

— GB News (@GBNEWS) September 15, 2026

Heidi Bachram, whose husband’s relatives were murdered and taken hostage by Hamas, blasted the decision, urging “This country’s legal system is a nasty joke,”and adding “He should have been deported.” A foreigner, she noted, can “paint a threat to Jews on the statue of our greatest leader with the added red triangle to make clear it isn’t the ‘peaceful’ version of Intifada and GET AWAY WITH IT.”

This is the closing speech of Olax Outis where he says he should have done something more “spectacular”. Like burning down a weapons factory as a group did in Czech Republic. This is extraordinary and I cannot comprehend this man is walking free. pic.twitter.com/vstz61VJwr

— Heidi Bachram (@HeidiBachram) September 15, 2026

What I don’t understand about the jury sympathising with this guy is his blatant disingenuousness. Here he complains about not getting an interpreter while speaking in almost perfect English. We live in Bizarro World. pic.twitter.com/plMYxyn3E5

— Heidi Bachram (@HeidiBachram) September 15, 2026

You won’t even get convicted as along as it’s ‘protest’. I wonder if this would have happened if it were far right messages though.

— Heidi Bachram (@HeidiBachram) September 15, 2026

This is a disgusting ruling that will only embolden far-left thugs to vandalise our national hero’s statue time and time again.

Would the same injustice have been done if it were Gandhi’s or Mandela’s statue that had been defaced? https://t.co/MjwUN4oeh4

— Alex Armstrong (@Alexarmstrong) September 15, 2026

WANKER who did this, desecrated Winston Churchill found not guilty of criminal damage arguing in court the paint washed off.

A Green light for these bastards to do the same to anything else.

Imagine if you threw some of that on a Mosque, your feet wouldn’t touch the floor…. pic.twitter.com/pYiYrgKwiG

— Tony (@EvacTony) September 15, 2026

That is the two-tier point, and it is not a slogan. The Met and Greater Manchester Police spent last winter warning that “globalise the intifada” could get you arrested. The same words went up in red on Churchill’s monument. The man who put them there told a jury the paint came off. The jury said not guilty.

None of this sits in a vacuum. Churchill is being taken apart in official rooms while activists take him apart in the square.

Last week it emerged the Bank of England had spent more than £85,000 researching how to get him off the £5 note. Consultants told officials that portraits of notable Britons were “elitist and divisive,” a “backward-looking vision of the UK that carries too great a risk of division and controversy.” Hedgehogs and puffins are waiting in the wings. Nigel Farage called the plan “absolutely crackers.” Kemi Badenoch called it “erasing our history.”

The same city that cannot convict a man for spraying “Zionist war criminal” across Churchill is being lectured by the UN’s racial discrimination committee to put up statues of people of African descent as atonement for slavery – as if Britain had not banned the trade, spent blood and treasure suppressing it, and already spent years ripping down or boxing up its own monuments.

Sadiq Khan’s Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm was built for that mood. Churchill’s statue was boarded up in 2020. The lecture has not stopped.

Churchill’s statue today in London. I’m speechless. pic.twitter.com/lU6Y37my7e

— Antonello Guerrera (@antoguerrera) June 12, 2020

They even installed the punchline. On Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth last week City Hall unveiled Tschabalala Self’s five-metre Lady in Blue – sold as an “everywoman,” a “symbol of confidence and purpose,” and, in the CNN version, a win because it is “not another White man.” It stands in the ceremonial heart of the capital, opposite Nelson, paid for out of the same public art machine that treats British victory as an embarrassment.

Picture the same red paint poured all over that figure. The press releases write themselves. The outrage would be industrial.

In a rare development, Belarus – which forms a ‘Union State’ with Russia, has received partial US sanctions relief after it agreed to free 25 political prisoners. 

President Trump’s envoy, John Coale, revealed to reporters in the Belarusian capital Minsk: “We agreed to an interim deal, and as a show of goodwill Belarus will release 25 people and in exchange the United States will lift sanctions on two companies.”

The deal follows a much bigger amnesty for prisoners brokered by Washington that occurred last March. At that time the Lukashenko government freed a huge amount – 250 people.

“We will continue to improve U.S.-Belarus relations and are working to secure the release of more people in the very near future. We are not finished!” Coale had later posted on X.

One regional outlet has outlined what the Belarussians are getting in return:

The two companies to be removed from U.S. sanctions are Lakokraska, a manufacturer of paints and industrial coatings, and Bellesbumprom, a state-owned industrial concern that oversees the forestry, pulp and paper sectors. Sanctions against them have been in place since 2008 and 2023, respectively.

Coale also promised Lukashenko on Tuesday to get U.S. banks to hand back tens of millions of dollars in frozen Belarusian assets.

Back in September of 2025, there had been an initial breakthrough deal which centered on the release of 52 prisoners deemed held on political grounds, such as based on speech or political activism.

Russia’s aviation sector has also long been sanctioned, leading to the potential for unsafe travel or possible aerial disasters – as aging fleets are in need of regular servicing, often dependent on access to US and Western parts. This is something Minsk has also sought to grain relief from Washington for.

President Trump has in the recent past indicated that he looks forward to meeting with President Lukashenko in the future, in a sign of a likely further thawing of relations.

BREAKING:

Belarus has freed 25 political prisoners. They are now in Lithuania.

U.S. special envoy John Coale published a photo of those released.

Among them are journalists, musicians, lawyers, and other well-known protest figures. pic.twitter.com/5CH31mdVgJ

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) September 16, 2026

More broadly, this is also part of US efforts to reverse spiraling bilateral relations with Moscow, given that Russia and Belarus work hand and glove in defense, economic, and political areas. Belarusian territory has long been a staging ground for Putin’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine as well, and hosts Russian tactical nukes – which Europe has long kept a very close eye on.

Authored by Paul Birch via The Daily Sceptic,

Many of us in Britain still flatter ourselves that we live in a free country. Although the UK isn’t quite a police state (not yet anyway), neither is it a country in which the individual can any longer speak without glancing over his or her shoulder. The old compact of a liberal society was simple – the state punished genuine criminality, while opinion was left to the rough justice of argument, satire and public disagreement.

That compact has now been comprehensively torn up. Across Britain, speech that would once have been answered by rebuttal or humour is now treated as a matter for police, regulators and secretive Whitehall machinery. A report published this week by civil liberties and privacy campaigning organisation Big Brother Watch states that more than 62,000 people in the United Kingdom were arrested for communications offences over a five year period, with at least 18,500 charged and 12,292 convicted. These numbers should alarm anyone who still believes the citizen is master and the state is servant.

This is not some marginal administrative adjustment. It is the apparatus of speech control operating on an industrial scale. Some cases will involve genuine threats – stalking, domestic abuse or harassment – and those cases should, of course, be investigated. But when arrest numbers vastly outstrip those of conviction, as is highlighted in the report, it is clear the process itself has become the punishment. The knock at the door, the search, the device seizure, the interview, the stigma, the potential loss of employment and the unmistakable lesson to everyone watching – keep quiet.

Worse, enforcement appears completely arbitrary. Big Brother Watch has described a “postcode lottery” of speech policing, with sharply different arrest rates between forces. Cumbria was reported as arresting people at dramatically higher rates than neighbouring Northumbria (although Cumbria Police has history when it comes to ‘woke’ policing). Liberty which varies by postcode is not liberty at all. It is permission, granted or withheld by local institutional mood. If the same national law produces radically different policing outcomes, the law is either too vague to restrain power or too tempting for power to resist.

The root of the problem lies in modern speech law and its elasticity. The Crown Prosecution Service guidance on communications offences covers offences under the Malicious Communications Act 1988, the Communications Act 2003 and Part 10 of the Online Safety Act 2023, including offences involving false or threatening communications. The framework encompasses messages said to be “grossly offensive”, “indecent”, “obscene” or “menacing”. Those words may sound reassuring in a statute book, but in the hands of ideological bureaucracies they become draconian tools to subdue inconvenient perspectives.

Recent cases expose the rot. In Hertfordshire, Rosalind Levine and Maxie Allen were arrested after complaints about their daughter’s primary school appeared in a parents’ WhatsApp group. They were held for eleven hours on suspicion including harassment and malicious communications. Hertfordshire Police later admitted the legal criteria for arrest were not met and agreed to pay them £20,000 in compensation. This is what happens when public bodies discover that the police can be weaponised as a complaints department with handcuffs.

The same authoritarian drift is visible with the now notorious notion of the Non-Crime Hate Incident. The clue is in the name – no crime has been committed. Lawful speech has been recorded by police in a way that brands ordinary people with a quasi-criminal stain. The College of Policing has now proposed major reforms, explicitly recognising that lawful free speech is not a police matter and that personal data should be recorded only where there is a clear policing purpose. That admission matters. It is an institutional confession that the state wandered far beyond its proper boundary – although it remains to be seen how police senior management across the country, many of whom are politically motivated, interpret these reforms.

My final role in policing involved facilitating the removal of terrorist content from the internet. This consisted of clear, unequivocal material glamourising proscribed groups, often including graphic footage of combat and the murder of captives. However, we began to notice that we were being tasked increasingly to assess content which was much more subjective: not violent or calling for violence, but ‘hateful’ – and only if viewed from a very specific point on the philosophical spectrum. This became more apparent with the establishment of police hate crime teams, and the fact that pursuing a nebulous ‘far Right’ was something which could gain one significant career advantages.

Then there is the darker machinery of government itself. Big Brother Watch’s ‘ Ministry of Truth‘ investigation alleged that secretive Whitehall counter-disinformation units monitor lawful political dissent online, including politicians, journalists, academics, campaigners and members of the public. In counter-terrorism policing, we were aware of the existence of some such units, but it is now clear this operation is much more extensive and that it runs much deeper than at first thought.

The public are told this is all about ‘misinformation’, but it has drifted into monitoring criticism of government policy. This is how censorship grows in a democracy – not with bonfires of books, but with dashboards, ‘trusted-flagger’ relationships, ‘narrative’ reports and officials quietly nudging platforms to reduce the reach of inconvenient opinions.

The Online Safety Act has only exacerbated the danger by shifting censorship pressure onto content service providers. Defenders say it targets illegality and protects children. Yet the predictable and inevitable result of duties, regulatory risk and political panic, is over-removal. Platforms don’t need to be commanded in plain language to censor; they need only be made afraid. Risk-averse companies will hide lawful speech, demand identity checks, throttle debate and call it compliance. The censor’s hand now often wears a corporate glove, especially if advertising revenue streams are threatened.

A serious country punishes tangible threats, criminality and violence. It doesn’t send the police after off-colour jokes, parental complaints or political dissent. We have to choose. We can choose to remain a liberal democracy in which the state respects the citizen, or we can become a managerial state in which the citizen fears a file, a knock on the door, a call from an online safety team or the quiet downgrade of their opinions.

Speech offences need to be drastically narrowed to those which call for direct violence or harm; ideological intelligence-gathering against lawful expression should be abolished; regulators ought to be restrained, and government content-flagging outside the terrorist space must be transparent.

Free speech isn’t a courtesy extended by ministers, chief constables or Silicon Valley compliance teams. It is the condition of citizenship in any civilised country. Without it, liberty is just a word in the dictionary.

Authored by Karl-Friedrich Israel via The Daily Economy,

The median-priced home in America now costs $440,600, while the median household earns roughly $84,000 a year. That gap has left a growing share of Americans priced out of buying altogether, while those who already own homes and hold stocks have watched their wealth compound. The renter-owner wealth gap is now the widest on record. Meanwhile, equity markets keep setting new highs. None of this, officially, counts as inflation.

In a previous piece, I explained that the Consumer Price Index leaves out a large and growing share of what households are really forced to pay for: government spending financed by taxes rather than purchased voluntarily on markets. That is one CPI blind spot. There is a second, and it is arguably more consequential for how Americans experience economic reality. The price of stocks, homes, and other assets essentially does not appear at all in conventional inflation measures.

Why Asset Prices Fall Outside The CPI

The reason again traces back to the index-number theory Gottfried Haberler laid out in Vienna in 1927, which I’ve written about elsewhere. Haberler showed that the standard price indices economists use – Laspeyres and Paasche, and averages of the two – can be trusted as measures of an individual’s true cost of living only under a specific set of assumptions about that individual. One of those unstated assumptions is that the individual is a pure consumer: someone who spends the whole of their income on present consumption, full stop. No saving. No portfolio. No home, or even portion of a home, purchased as an investment rather than simply a place to live.

That assumption is a reasonable simplification for the sake of theoretical tractability. It is also the reason a stock portfolio or a home’s resale value has no place in a cost-of-living index built on Haberler’s logic. The CPI does track shelter, but only through “owners’ equivalent rent” – an estimate of what it would cost to rent the service flow of a home, not the price of the home as an asset. Equities do not enter the index in any form. A pure consumer, by design, does not hold assets. An index built for a pure consumer has nothing to say about what happens to their prices.

A Reasonable Exclusion With A Widening Consequence

That exclusion made the CPI theoretically coherent – it’s meant to measure consumer spending, after all. It also means that some of the fastest price inflation in the American economy over the past three decades has been completely invisible to the number the Federal Reserve targets (the PCE price index) and the media reports (the CPI).

Since 1995, the S&P 500 has compounded at roughly 9.2 percent a year (15x) and home prices, as measured by the Case-Shiller index, at about 4.7 percent a year (4x). The CPI, over the same period, rose about 2.6 percent a year (2.2x). Stocks have outrun consumer prices by a factor of more than three; home prices, by nearly two. The CPI alone has no way of seeing any of these inflationary pressures – not the run-up in home prices that has priced many younger Americans out of the market, nor the equity gains flowing overwhelmingly to households that already owned assets before the run-up began.

Why Assets, In Particular?

If asset prices simply drifted upward for reasons unrelated to monetary policy, and the PCE’s and CPI’s exclusion of them was a harmless accident, we might more easily excuse CPI’s shortcomings. But there is a plausible monetary explanation for why the exclusion has mattered so much specifically since the mid-1990s.

If money were neutral and its growth simply distributed itself proportionally across real output growth and consumer price inflation, the M2 money supply should grow at roughly the sum of real GDP growth and CPI inflation over time. We can check that directly: take average M2 growth and subtract the sum of average real GDP growth and average CPI growth, before and after 1995.

From 1959 through 1994, M2 grew at 7.2 percent a year, against real GDP growth of 3.5 percent and CPI inflation of 4.7 percent – a combined 8.2 percent. The gap was slightly negative: roughly 1.0 percentage point a year. Money growth, if anything, ran a bit behind the pace of real economic growth and consumer price inflation combined.

Since 1995, the picture flips. M2 has grown at 6.2 percent a year, while real GDP and the CPI have grown at 2.5 percent per year each – a combined 5.0 percent. The gap is now a positive 1.2 percentage points a year, a swing of roughly two full points from the prior 35 years.

That is not a rounding error compounding harmlessly in the background. Over three decades, a persistent 1.2-point annual gap compounds into a very large sum of money that was created by government, but not absorbed by real output growth. By definition, it did not show up as measured consumer price inflation.

Money Is Not Neutral

Additional money does not raise every price by the same proportion, leaving the underlying structure of the economy untouched. It enters the economy at specific points – through banks, credit markets, and the institutions that first receive newly created liquidity – and its effects ripple outward unevenly from there. By the time new money reaches the people, higher prices have already consumed its extra value. Austrian economists, like Haberler’s contemporary Friedrich Hayek, have long described this with the Cantillon effect. In an economy where basic consumption needs are largely saturated for a large share of households, additional liquidity is more likely to flow into savings and investment vehicles, such as stocks and real estate, than into proportionally higher demand for groceries and clothing.

That is precisely the pattern in the data. The monetary overhang that opened up after 1995 lines up closely with the period over which stocks and home prices pulled away from the CPI. None of this proves a single, simple causal explanation. Asset prices respond to many forces, from productivity growth to demographics to global capital flows. But a persistent, multi-decade gap between money creation on the one hand and real growth plus consumer price inflation on the other is exactly the kind of monetary overhang that should show up somewhere. In a consumption-saturated economy, the most likely place for it to show up is in the price of the assets the CPI was never built to measure.

That leaves conventional inflation measures with two blind spots stacked on top of each other. The CPI omits the government-financed consumption taxpayers cannot opt out of, and it omits the asset-price inflation driving the widening gap between those who already own homes and stocks and those still trying to buy in. Neither omission is a flaw in how the CPI is calculated. Both are consequences of what the CPI was, by its own underlying economic theory, never designed to measure.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has again responded to allegations of European officials that Moscow seeks to expand the war beyond Ukraine.

We earlier detailed how recent drone spillover from the conflict, including explosive-laden drones coming out of Belarusian territory and threatening the Baltics, has resulted in Western officials increasingly alluding to NATO ‘collective defense’.

This is highly dangerous as it means the situation could rapidly escalate into full-blown Russia-NATO direct confrontation on the basis of a single aircraft shootdown.

In his fresh remarks from Ekaterinburg, Russia – where he was addressing the International Youth Festival on Wednesday, FM Lavrov made clear that Russia has not intent of ever attacking Europe.

But he coupled the statement with a very severe and ominous warning, that could have nuclear implications.

“I would like to emphasize that we have no interest in engaging in this [attacking Europe], but if Europe, which is talking about preparing for war against Russia on a daily basis, attacks Russia, it will be a completely different war, and it will be very short,” Lavrov said in remarks translated by national media.

According to more:

The minister also expressed the hope that Europe had heard the warning about a short war in the event of an attack on Russia.

Sergey Lavrov expressed doubts regarding the idea that the world is being governed based solely on agreements between the United States and China, noting that China has a completely different approach to global affairs.

Again, though not expressly stated, Lavrov’s warning hints a using nuclear weapons – given the emphasis on such a conflict being “short”.

Reading between the lines, he is saying that while Russia doesn’t want to go to war with Europe, the only scenario where that would be possible is if Russia is under direct attack and deems its existential survival at stake. Such a thresh-hold reached would likely justify use of strategic forces if President Putin made the decision. 

What’s different or curious about the veiled Lavrov warning is that it is typically the ‘hawk’ Dmitry Medvedev making them. The former Russian president and current Deputy Chairman of the Security Council is typically the one making such maximalist warnings.

All of this suggests the Kremlin sees escalation with NATO in the atmosphere, which it authentically doesn’t seem to want.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Bill Gates has a new emergency. With the climate apocalypse no longer selling, the Microsoft co-founder is touring the press circuit warning that artificial intelligence is an “alien intelligence,” that no government on earth is ready for it, and that the only fix is an international organization to police the technology.

President Trump has already rejected the pause. The left, the globalist class, Beijing’s spy chief, and now a Sundance-to-Netflix documentary are all at once selling the same story.

In a Reuters interview published Tuesday, Gates said no capital is prepared for what is coming. “I don’t think any government is nearly as deep on this as they have to be,” he told the outlet. “Governments are way behind on this one.”

Bill Gates Calls for an ‘International Organization’ to Regulate AI

“It’s not the role of the industry to self-regulate or understand the whole-of-society impact that comes out of AI … The depth of understanding of AI … is too low in every entity, including the government.” pic.twitter.com/y85BgPDDJ6

— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) September 15, 2026

He compared AI to a Hollywood invasion plot in which Washington and Beijing suddenly hold hands. “There’s all sorts of movies where some aliens are coming, and magically the US and China and everybody comes together to solve the problem,” Gates said. “AI is kind of like this alien intelligence. It’s here, and we better do like it shows in those movies.”

The New York Post framed it as a “terrifying warning.” Forbes led with the line Gates attached to his foundation’s Goalkeepers report: left to the market, “AI will be designed by and for the richest people in the world.”

Bill Gates Warns AI Will Be Designed ‘By And For The Richest’ Without Regulationhttps://t.co/DXTP4Qjbn5 pic.twitter.com/HKYEuyCQXb

— Forbes (@Forbes) September 15, 2026

He wrote that AI could be “a great equalizer – or widen the gap,” and that choices made in “the next 12 to 18 months” will decide whether the tools “benefit the people who already have the most or reach those who have the least.” He added that the good outcome “won’t happen by accident.”

On The Times Tech Pod, Gates went further and called for a dedicated global apparatus. Industry, he said, should not be trusted to police itself. “It’s not the role of the industry to self-regulate or understand the whole-of-society impact that comes out of AI,” he argued. “The depth of understanding of AI … is too low in every entity, including the government.”

In a late-August essay, Gates wrote that “the transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history” and that “unfortunately, right now, we are not preparing for it.”

He floated a new international organization built from pieces of nuclear inspections, aviation rules, and ozone treaties – a permanent cross-border watchdog for a technology American labs still lead. He has been pitching the same idea to Trump’s team and says he wants a meeting with China’s Xi Jinping later this year.

This guy just wants global authoritarianism

He tries it however he can

Climate, health, now AI

— The Individual (@Tweet137188103) September 15, 2026

While Gates talks crisis, his foundation is writing checks to expand the thing. On Tuesday the Gates Foundation pledged at least $1 billion over two years to spread AI in education, health, and agriculture – 40 percent tutoring and classroom tools, 40 percent diagnostics and drug discovery, the rest farming advice and the data layer that makes models work in languages other than English. The money sits inside a previously announced $9 billion-a-year spend.

David Sirota caught the split in one line.

Bill Gates is warning about the dangers of AI while spending $1 billion to promote the expansion of AI pic.twitter.com/sjgvEalB4r

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) September 15, 2026

That is the move. Sound the alarm. Demand a global referee. Keep a foundation-sized stake in the rollout.

This is not Gates’ first end-of-the-world product. For years he sold net-zero as civilization’s last exit – fewer cows, fake meat, the whole ritual. Then the data-center boom needed power, lots of it, and last October he allowed that climate change “won’t lead to humanity’s demise.” Trump treated the climbdown as a concession speech. “I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax,” he wrote. “Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue. It took courage to do so, and for that we are all grateful. MAGA!!!”

The scare apparatus was not retired. Once everyone realised the planet was not going to cook on schedule, the same network needed a replacement threat big enough to justify treaties, inspectors, and “international coordination.”

AI arrived on cue: jobs, cyberattacks, companions, bioterror, “loss of control.” All of it real enough to discuss. None of it a license to park American development under a UN-flavored commission while Beijing keeps shipping cheap open-weight models.

The entertainment wing has added its own contribution in the same news cycle. Netflix has just put up The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, the Sundance premiere from Oscar-winner Daniel Roher (Navalny) and Charlie Tyrell. The film sits Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, Reid Hoffman, Yuval Noah Harari, and the usual “humane tech” chorus in front of a camera and walks the audience through impending AI dread dressed up as a father-to-be’s anxiety.

One of the producers said the hope was that it would work “kind of like ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ or ‘The Social Dilemma’ for AI.” That is the tell. Same template. New monster.

Want to understand how propaganda works?

Tomorrow, Netflix premieres The AI Doc starring Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and also Reid Hoffman. ?

The topic? Impending doom about AI.

The movie was launched by Sundance Festival in February. Yup. The Sundance Documentary Program… pic.twitter.com/0BEGcjsLsJ

— Erikaaa (@ErikaCA47) September 15, 2026

The film premiered at Sundance in January, played theaters in March, and dropped on Netflix this week – the same week Gates, Obama’s orbit, Bernie Sanders, and the lab CEOs were all pushing slowdown and supervision.

The Sundance Documentary Film Program was built with founding money from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Users circulating the credits call the Netflix drop a globalist op.

When the policy class needs the public frightened into a pause, Hollywood still knows how to dim the lights.

Mass media has just launched one of the largest PSYOPs since COVID-19.

This time, it’s the World Economic Forum’s long-awaited “CYBER PANDEMIC.” https://t.co/juLBRN0EfS pic.twitter.com/KRW39D0ZxL

— Nicolas Hulscher, MPH (@NicHulscher) September 15, 2026

Now I’m fully convinced this is a psyop https://t.co/3wJ63q73tB

— Sola Awodiya (@Solaawodiya) September 14, 2026

Over the weekend, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei called on rivals to “pace the frontier.” Sam Altman and Elon Musk backed the letter. Former researcher Jacob Coxon quit and said AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

? JUST IN: Elon Musk just said if Anthropic and OpenAI people are warning that the models are “very dangerous,” we should believe them. Then he mocked the pitch. A 10 PERCENT chance of annihilating humanity… and how much of the IPO would you like?

Fox’s guest nailed the real… pic.twitter.com/EWLbE1Rte3

— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) September 15, 2026

President Trump waved the pile-on off. The United States is “leading China in AI,” he said. “Whoever wins AI, wins.” A lot of “very negative forces,” he added, are “bringing up things that won’t happen.” Guardrails, fine. A pause, no. Asked about existential risk leaving Dallas, he shot back: “No, I don’t have any.”

Jesse Watters noted that the same CEOs are “begging for government regulations,” while claiming the tech is more powerful than a nuclear weapon and could wipe everyone out in three years. Then the obvious question: if they are that terrified of their own product, why do they need politicians to slow it down for them? “Something smells fishy with these IPOs.”

? WOW: AI CEO’s are BEGGING for government regulations! ??

They claim AI is more powerful than a nuclear weapon and could kill us all in 3 years.

But why do they need politicians to slow it down? Something smells fishy with these IPOs! ?? pic.twitter.com/UVsEsZOrUN

— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) September 14, 2026

David Sacks named the shakedown. OpenAI and Anthropic are the frontier. If their unreleased models are too hot, they can simply not ship them. Demanding antitrust waivers, embedded evaluators, and a regulatory architecture as the price of restraint, he wrote, “will look like blackmail of the public and the political system.”

Regulation written by the incumbents does not save humanity. It freezes the ladder so the next lab never climbs it – right as those same firms eye public markets.

Barack Obama took the other door. At a Manhattan fundraiser he told Hakeem Jeffries that if Democrats win the House they should make AI a governing project. “Once you are speaker, I would strongly urge that the Democrats put together a framework for a very public conversation.”

Then: “This is something that is moving very fast in private hands, and if we don’t get on top of it, I think can be dangerous.” Jeffries saluted on command. “President Obama is correct that decisive action must be taken on artificial intelligence… Republicans have abdicated their responsibility… We will not repeat their error.”

Bernie Sanders has been running the same play for weeks: pause advanced development, permanently ban superintelligence, and get Trump and Xi to sign a treaty. On Tuesday, at a Washington “Pro-Human Assembly,” he said a runaway system “will not be an American problem. It will not be a Chinese problem. It will be humanity’s problem,” and he again demanded a comprehensive pause-and-ban deal at the coming Trump – Xi meeting.

That is the globalist package in one stack: slow the American frontier, internationalize the rules, and call it safety.

Then China’s ministry of state security walked into the same conversation. Chen Yixin, Beijing’s top spy chief, used the state-run magazine China Cyberspace to warn that AI is “directly threatening our political security, institutional security, and ideological security.”

He called for tighter Party control and stricter government oversight. Hostile forces, he wrote, “abuse generative artificial intelligence technologies… to fabricate political rumors, spread harmful information, and incite confrontational sentiments at low cost and in large quantities.”

?? BREAKING – Here we go. Now China’s top spy chief is warning about the dangers of AI and calling for greater government oversight…

All while China is using Anthropic’s AI, Claude, to develop weapons and spy on America. It’s like China was behind this ALL ALONG…

He is… pic.twitter.com/Y6Ti1nf3Fd

— The Patriot Oasis™ (@ThePatriotOasis) September 15, 2026

He named American models – Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5-Cyber – as a “disruptive upgrade” in cyber capability, and billed AI as “a new arena for strategic rivalry among major powers.”

He is not asking America to pause so the world can be safe. He is asking the Party to lock down speech, data, and “ideological security” at home while Western executives and Democratic politicians talk themselves into a slowdown.

Days earlier, Anthropic’s own threat report said China-linked actors had already used Claude for weapons software and intelligence work the company then banned: an electronic-warfare and air-defense suite whose simulation was expanded to twelve targets in Taiwan; research into foreign high-power microwave weapons; and domestic surveillance pipelines that collapse “many teams of analysts” into a single office producing thousands of investigations a month.

Anthropic publishes an alarming new report saying it blocked several possible attempts to use its AI models to develop biological weapons

“Anthropic says a lab outside the US gained access to Claude from an unsupported region, using the model to help research a highly pathogenic… pic.twitter.com/0ngckQbOB2

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) September 15, 2026

Chinese labs, Anthropic said, also tried to strip Claude’s capabilities to feed their own models. Beijing’s foreign ministry shrugged that it was “not aware” of the report and opposed “smears.”

So the sequence is simple. China runs Western models for weapons and control. China’s spy chief then lectures the world about AI danger and Party oversight. Gates wants a global body. Sanders wants a Trump – Xi treaty. Obama wants Democrats to “get on top of it.” Netflix wants you crying on the couch. The CEOs want a rulebook that just happens to protect their lead.

America does not need Bill Gates’ alien-movie summit, Chen Yixin’s definition of safety, or another Inconvenient Truth with better animation. It needs the thing Trump already said out loud. Win the race.

Vice President JD Vance – who was said to have opposed launching Operation Epic Fury from the beginning – has issued some fresh statements on the future of the Iran conflict which sound a bit off-rampy.

He could just be voicing his own wishful thinking, however, in proclaiming the conflict will soon enter “a much different phase” in the coming months. He still conceded that ultimately it’s the Commander-in-Chief who decides when it will end (though it would be nice of Congress or the American people had a word).

President Trump had just last week stated his view that hostilities will wrap up after the November mid-term elections, and Vance appeared to try and defend the statement.

“We can’t predict the future, but I think the [US] President [Donald Trump] is right to say that this thing [the conflict in Iran – TASS] will enter a much different phase in a couple of months,” he told New York Post in an interview.

Vance described that the US military had already completed the first phase, which the Vice President described as to “destroy the nuclear program” of Iran as well as “their conventional military.”

“And then the second phase of this is ensure that they’re not able to rebuild and try to maintain as much global stability in the wake of that,” he said.

But as far as destruction of conventional military, the Iranians have clearly been lobbing large quantities of ballistic missiles at US bases in Jordan, for example just earlier this month during the last flare-up in fighting. This occurred overnight from Sept.8-9, and saw Iran fire some 20 ballistic missiles.

As for “rebuilding” – well, Tehran is proudly and defiantly asserting that it is currently doing just that. According to The Wall Street Journal citing US officials a week ago:

Iran has resumed its production of ballistic missiles using stockpiled components and working in underground facilities, officials from the U.S. and Middle East familiar with the matter said, eroding what the U.S. and Israel have touted as a major achievement of the war. 

Despite heavy attacks on its missile sites and industrial facilities during the initial phase of the war, Iran has been busy assembling liquid-propellant missiles, which have to be fueled just before launch, as well as solid-propellant missiles, which can be stored ready to fire, some of the officials said.

The US administration has repeatedly claimed to have destroyed or else severely set back Iran’s advanced missile arsenal – and yet they keep on firing.

Read: Bombshell Leaks Seek To Distance ‘Skeptical’ JD Vance From Iran War

Below: As war expands, US scrambles to contain the fallout and damage, also after Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline was hit in a drone attack (out of either Iraq or possibly Yemen):

Vance says US is in direct contact with Yemen’s Houthis as well as with Saudi Arabia and the UAE over recent developments there pic.twitter.com/C1EM7Lmthn

— Joseph Haboush (@jhaboush) September 14, 2026

Many pundits have also pointed out that Iran’s Islamic revolutionary government has essentially been preparing for this war with the US and Israel for several decades. And clearly Washington was woefully underprepared for the Iranian retaliation.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

The same online machine that turned a confessed child killer into a cause has a new target. After hanging Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial, the lone holdout juror’s family says TikTok extremists have them trapped indoors, leaving notes at his mother’s house and refusing to let them live in peace.

The juror’s brother told the New York Post that the family’s life has been flipped over since the September 4 mistrial in Plymouth, Massachusetts. He rejected the claim that Catholic faith drove the holdout vote.

“I don’t think religion had anything to do with it,” he said. “He looked at the case, and he made the call. For me, that’s how I would do it. I would just listen to the case with all the evidence, and go from there.”

NEW: The family of the holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy trial says they are being harassed by TikTok extremists following the trial, according to the New York Post.

The holdout juror’s brother says his Catholic faith didn’t override his judgment in the trial and that they… pic.twitter.com/D86e1kOMZu

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 15, 2026

“My family cannot leave the house,” the brother said. “They are leaving notes at my mother’s house. They won’t leave us alone, and we don’t know anything.”

He added that none of them even knew their relative was on the jury until after the verdict collapsed. “We didn’t know. That’s why I was shocked. He didn’t tell us anything.”

NEW DETAILS: The brother of the lone holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy mistrial told the New York Post the family’s life has been turned upside down. “My family cannot leave the house,” he said. “They are leaving notes at my mother’s house. They won’t leave us alone.”

“I don’t… pic.twitter.com/Y9Jx3wLRCN

— RedWave Press (@RedWavePress) September 15, 2026

Clancy, 36, admitted strangling her children – Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan – with exercise bands in the basement of the family’s Duxbury home on January 24, 2023, while Patrick Clancy was out on an errand she had sent him on. She then cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window.

The defense never disputed the killings. Attorney Kevin Reddington argued postpartum psychosis and no criminal responsibility. Prosecutors said she cleared the house, chose a method that worked on the children, and chose a method for herself that failed.

After 21 days of testimony, more than 80 witnesses, and nearly 40 hours of deliberations, the panel split 11-1. Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial. District Attorney Tim Cruz has a status hearing set for September 29 on whether to retry.

Reddington blamed the holdout in public. “They know they were robbed by one man, for whatever his agenda was,” he said. “I hope that guy can sleep well at night.”

Fellow jurors have since gone on television to attack him. One described wrapping an exercise band around a water bottle in the deliberation room. Others said he would not “follow the law” on reasonable doubt. What they will not say is the simpler point: one juror would not treat the strangling of three children as a medical event.

A GiveSendGo launched for security, lawyers, and lost work shot past $80,000 and, according to the Post, raced toward six figures. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis offered the juror “asylum” if the harassment continued. “A man objected to allowing a woman to kill her three young kids and get away with it, so NBC is trying to smear that juror,” DeSantis wrote.

as we previously highlighted, during the trial hundreds of women in pink have been gathering outside Plymouth Superior Court for a “Stand in Peace.” They cheered Clancy’s transport. Organizer Renee Kimball said, “I think that every one of us women believe that it could be any one of us.” Another supporter put it on camera: “It could be me.”

The same cohort poured money into a GoFundMe for Clancy’s parents that raced toward seven figures. TikTok mothers filmed themselves “relating” to the confessed killer while holding their own infants. Some insisted Patrick must have done it – in spite of Lindsay’s admissions, her lawyer’s opening, the 911 tape, and the civil lawsuit that says she killed the children.

That inversion did not stay on the internet.

Patrick Clancy sat through the trial as the prosecution’s first witness. He described coming home with food and medicine to find his children gone. He has said he forgives Lindsay and calls her ill rather than evil.

His reward has been a smear campaign claiming he was involved. Attorney Howard Cooper of Todd & Weld called it “a relentless, escalating and destructive defamation campaign” driven by “minor celebrities, so-called influencers and outright conspiracy theorists.”

“This campaign, now fueled by insatiable media coverage, remains at a fever pitch and has resulted in real-life threats to his reputation, livelihood, and life,” Cooper said. “Enough is enough – this spread of blatant and baseless falsehoods must stop.” Law enforcement has been notified.

Attorney David Meier said after the mistrial: “The loss of Patrick’s children is something from which he will never recover and from which there will never be closure. The prospect of reliving this tragedy through another trial is extraordinarily painful.”

While the Clancy jury was still out, Corie Walsh of Frankfort, Illinois, hanged her 2-year-old son, Barrett, from a basement rafter. She told police the boy was the “devil” and the “anti-Christ.” Witnesses said she had become “very invested” in the Clancy trial and was still texting friends about it hours before the child was found.

Her lawyer, Andrea Lyon, reached for the same line the pink shirts have been rehearsing: “It is also a tragedy in that Corey herself was experiencing a psychotic episode at the time this happened.” Prosecutors said she spoke of harming the remaining children and her husband.

Rep. Nancy Mace, speaking to TMZ DC, called Clancy a “serial killer” and said the country should watch the penalty.

“Her children are dead. She should be dead too,” she said. “She should get the death penalty. It should be public. It should be a public execution.”

However, Massachusetts has not executed anyone since 1947. First-degree murder there is life without parole.

Reddington went on Good Morning America and asked President Trump to pardon his client. “Mr. President, I would hope that you would consider this young lady and the person she is, what she’s been through, and consider a pardon,” he said. A president cannot erase a Massachusetts murder case. Trump treated it as the state matter it is.

After the mistrial he said Clancy “did a horrible, horrible thing,” that “there’ll be a price,” and that it would be “mental institution or jail or something.” Asked again after the pardon plea, he said: “There is no winner there. There’s no win no matter what you do. Three children are dead.”

* * *

The Justice Department has used a national-security court that sat unused for three decades to deport an Afghan woman from the United States who supported an ISIS-inspired plot to carry out a mass shooting on Election Day in 2024.

On Friday, officials announced that Nazira Haji Zada, 47, a permanent resident from Fort Worth, Texas, was kicked out from the country after admitting that she is an “alien terrorist.”

Zada’s removal is the first completed case in the history of the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, a specialized tribunal Congress created in 1996 and that no prior administration ever used.

Federal prosecutors said Zada was the family matriarch who supported a plot by her son, Abdullah Haji Zada, and son-in-law, Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, to carry out an ISIS-inspired mass shooting on or around Election Day 2024. The two men were arrested after buying firearms and ammunition from an undercover FBI employee. Abdullah, who was 17 at the time of arrest, later pleaded guilty as an adult and was sentenced to 15 years. Tawhedi pleaded guilty to terrorism charges and is awaiting sentencing.

Court records describe the family selling property, signing a contract to sell their house, and buying one-way tickets to Kabul, while the two men prepared to stay behind and attack. The government used classified information to establish Zada’s terrorist status and provided her court-appointed lawyers with a massive document production. Zada appeared before ATRC Chief Judge Joan Ericksen, conceded the designation, and waived appeal. The removal order was signed August 20 and unsealed after she was already out of the country. Zada is now permanently barred from the U.S.

FBI Director Kash Patel hailed Zada’s deportation, saying that an individual who supported a plot by ISIS-sympathizing relatives “has paid the price.”

“This is a historic and vitally important step in our work to protect the U.S. homeland from terrorism,” Patel said in a statement. “An individual who supported a plot by ISIS-sympathizing family members to commit an attack in America has paid the price for that. She came to our country, betrayed it, and has now lost the right to live here and enjoy our democratic freedoms. This FBI and our Justice Department partners will protect the American people from the threat of terrorism, using all means necessary.”

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin also hailed the move.

“From the moment President Trump took office, he made clear that his Administration would put the safety and security of the American people first,” said Mullin. “The President’s direction to use the Alien Terrorist Removal Court to expel Nazira Haji Zada, an Afghan national who plotted with members of her family to carry out an ISIS-inspired attack on American soil, delivers on that promise. Thanks to the President’s leadership and the coordinated efforts the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice and State, Nazira Haji Zada’s final order of removal is now FINAL. Those who plot acts of terrorism against the United States have no place in our country. We will find them, and we will use every lawful tool available to remove them.“