Before Operation Epic Fury began, corporate media published a few very concerning headlines:

Fast forward to Monday afternoon: Operation Epic Fury against Iran has entered its 10th day. Jared Cohen, President of Global Affairs and Co-Head of the Goldman Sachs Global Institute, warned investors on the GS Weekend Macro Call that regional spillover risks worldwide were among his top concerns.

Latest headlines in the Middle East:

• Iran Signals ‘Fight To The End’ Under New Ayatollah, As US Struggles To Define Israeli-Coordinated Endgame

• “Let Them Keep Playing Games”: Iran Warns Of $200 Crude Oil

• G-7 Leaders Reject SPR Release Plan, But ‘Stand Ready’ After Initial Jawbone Efforts Fade

The focus of this note is not the energy market or global spillover risks. Rather, it is the fact that DARPA found time to publish a press release about an experimental aircraft with a historic lineage of X-planes.

DARPA said the new aircraft, called the X-76 and being built by Bell Textron, is designed to solve one of military aviation’s biggest trade-offs: combining airplane-like speed with helicopter-like runway independence.

The program, run jointly with U.S. Special Operations Command, aims to produce an aircraft that can cruise above 400 knots, hover in austere environments, and operate from unprepared surfaces.

DARPA said the X-76 has passed the Critical Design Review, and the program is moving into manufacturing, integration, assembly, and ground testing.

“For too long, the runway has been both an enabler and a tether, granting speed but creating a critical vulnerability,” said Cmdr. Ian Higgins, U.S. Navy, serving as the DARPA SPRINT program manager. “With SPRINT, we’re not just building an X-plane; we’re building options. We’re working to deliver the option of surprise, the option of rapid reinforcement, and the option of life-saving speed, anywhere on the globe, without needing any runway.”

It seems like DARPA found a sweet spot to debut the X-76, given the world seemingly at war. This likely means more war funding from taxpayers and, most likely, tailwinds for defense companies to push new products.

Submitted by Dylan Baddour via Inside Climate News (emphasis ours),

The imminent depletion of water supplies in Corpus Christi threatens to cut off the flow of jet fuel to Texas airports and other oil exports from one of the nation’s largest petroleum ports, triggering potential shockwaves through energy markets in Texas and beyond.

Without significant rainfall, Corpus Christi is headed for a “water emergency” within months and total depletion of the system next year, according to the city’s website.

“The impacts are going to be felt tremendously through the state, if not internationally,” said Sean Strawbridge, former CEO of the Port of Corpus Christi Authority, the nation’s top port for crude oil exports, in a 40-minute interview Thursday. “This should be no surprise to anybody. We were talking about this over a decade ago.”

Other current and former officials, alarmed at what they call a lack of preparations, have suggested the potential for an economic crisis involving mass layoffs, disruption of fuel supplies and billions of dollars in emergency spending to avoid an evacuation of the city. 

Strawbridge, who now lives in Houston, laid the blame on city leaders, citing “their lack of experience, their lack of knowledge, their lack of recognizing the risks” in a bumbling, decade-long endeavor to build a large seawater desalination plant that would veer the region off its clear course towards calamity.

“They’ve found themselves in quite a dire predicament as a result of those poor decisions,” Strawbridge said. “Time is up.” 

A spokesperson for Corpus Christi Mayor Paulette Guajardo declined interview requests, citing “prior commitments,” and did not respond to follow-up questions. City manager Peter Zanoni also did not respond to questions. Instead, Corpus Christi public information manager Robert Gonzales provided an emailed statement.

“The water shortage in the Coastal Bend is the result of a historic five-year drought,” it said. “Currently, the City of Corpus Christi has $1 billion in City Council-approved and funded water projects underway to address our water needs. The City remains committed to ensuring water security for the more than 500,000 residents and our commercial and industrial customers.”

Depletion of this region’s reservoirs would lead to “controlled depression” for the local economy, “mass unemployment” and “industrial total shutdown,” according to a two-page report by Don Roach, former assistant general manager of the San Patricio Municipal Water District, which supplies many of the region’s large industrial water users.

That includes refineries operated by Flint Hills Resources, Valero and Citgo that provide jet fuel to Texas airports and meet much of the state’s daily demand for gasoline.

“This waiting disaster is under the radar for the rest of the state,” said Roach, who worked 20 years at the water district and retired in 2014. “We hear nothing from the Texas politicians about the seriousness of the situation or any state plan to mitigate it.”

He no longer had access to current water data and contracts, he stressed, but produced the report based on his own knowledge. It said the costs of trucking in emergency water “would bankrupt many local small businesses and low-income households” while state emergency managers would need billions of dollars to “build emergency temporary pipelines or subsidize desalination barge rentals to prevent a total evacuation of the city.”

Strawbridge, a former director of the Port of Long Beach, said Roach’s assessment was “spot on.”

“No Time to Panic”

Zanoni, the city manager who has overseen Corpus Christi’s descent toward water depletion since 2019 and receives a $400,000 salary, rejected notions of imminent disaster during a press conference Thursday, when Lake Corpus Christi,  one of the city’s main reservoirs, dropped below 10 percent.  The press conference took place three days after Inside Climate News asked the city for comment about the impending water crisis.

“I think we are going to get through this,” he told TV cameras as he stood before the dwindling remnants of the lake. “We have confidence in what we’re doing. This is no time to panic.”

Zanoni, who holds a master’s of public administration from Florida State University, said the city had “worked tirelessly over the past months to bring everything that we humanly and possibly could to forego what could be this supply and demand issue.”

“Now we’re going to focus, with the City Council and the region, on being prepared in case supply doesn’t meet demand,” he said. 

“The best-case scenario, that assumes some level of rain, has this lake here going to about the early fall,” said Zanoni, who indicated that the summer months would give the city enough time to boot up its portfolio of new groundwater water projects..” 

James Dodson, a former director of Corpus Christi’s water department who retired this year as a private consultant and was involved in several of those projects, disagreed. He said residents and officials “are crazy not to be panicking.”

“It’s the very worst scenario that I’ve ever seen,” said Dodson, who oversaw a historic expansion of Corpus Christi’s water supply in the 1990s. “It’s going to be an economic disaster.”

For years, he said, the city dismissed repeated opportunities to develop groundwater import projects as it maintained a singular and fruitless focus on desalination. That includes projects that the city only recently scrambled to get started. Dodson doubted any will materialize in time.

“They’ve been kicking the can down the road for a long time and they’ve finally run out of road,” said a current regional water official who requested anonymity to preserve a working relationship with the city. “They’re looking at projects to do that they should have done five, six, seven years ago.”

The last hope to avert disaster, the official said, was a 20- to 30-inch rainfall. 

“It would basically have to be a hurricane,” he said.

A spokesperson for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Andrew Mahaleris, didn’t address specific comments about an impending water catastrophe or disruption of the state economy. In an emailed statement, he said: “Corpus Christi is an important economic driver not only for Texas but also the nation. The State of Texas has made significant investments into ensuring the Corpus Christi area has the water resources it needs to serve citizens and industry alike.”

He added that the governor “will continue working with the legislature to ensure Texans have a safe, reliable water supply for the next fifty years.”

“I Wouldn’t Say That It’s a Disaster”

Mere months remain, according to Corpus Christi’s online water dashboard, until the city enters a “Level 1 Emergency,” which begins 180 days from projected depletion of water supplies. Functional failure of the water system, or “dead pool,” will occur before total depletion. 

In a level one water emergency, the city’s plans call for an immediate 25 percent curtailment of water consumption. But city planners are only beginning to discuss what that would even look like and still haven’t determined how they would implement it.

“We can’t close and open everyone’s valves,” said Nick Winkelmann, chief operating officer of Corpus Christi Water, in an interview at City Hall last week. “One way to enact water restrictions is through pricing.”

The region’s largest industrial users, which collectively consume the majority of the region’s water, remain exempt from emergency curtailment. These multi-billion-dollar refineries, petrochemical plants and liquified natural gas facilities are built to run at a steady rate and can’t simply throttle down production in accordance with water availability. They consume large volumes of water primarily in cooling towers to prevent excessive heating and explosions. 

The city also may enact across-the-board, pro-rata curtailment at will, said Winkelmann, who assumed his role last September when the city’s former water director, Drew Molly, resigned days before the City Council pulled the plug on its long-running desalination project. “That will have an effect on all our customers.” 

For years, local business leaders insisted desalination was Corpus Christi’s key to overcoming the water limitations that had historically plagued it on this semi-arid coastline. Massive desalination plants, the first of their kind in Texas, were supposed to kick off an era of abundant water, financial prosperity and limitless economic expansion.

Instead, the plan drove this region to the precipice of ruin.  

“It has not gone as smoothly as it should have,” said Bob Paulison, a member of the Texas Chemistry Council, director of the Coastal Bend Industries Association and architect of the desalination project. “There are a lot of reasons for why that happened.”

He said he worked on desalination for 12 years, but the projects got bogged down by political fights, administrative processes, the COVID pandemic and “a tug of war which has resulted in very slow progress.”

“I wouldn’t say that it’s a disaster,” he said of the current situation, expressing faith that the city would complete new water projects before supplies run out. It was “too early” to assess when that could happen, he said. 

Presented with Roach’s report, Paulison expressed a longstanding respect for the veteran water manager and said, “It looks like it’s very dire, more dire than we’ve been looking at.”

“We’re relying on the model that the city has put together,” Paulison said. 

Regarding a potential shutdown of the entire refining and petrochemical complex, he said, “that could certainly shut down at some point, but we don’t see that happening in the early stages.”

Asked about plans to develop alternative jet fuel supplies for Texas airports in the case of a shutdown, Paulison said, “I’m sure that someone somewhere is working on that.”

Charles McConnell, a former assistant energy secretary with the Obama administration, wondered why concrete plans hadn’t been prepared. 

“Did it take them all the way to yesterday to figure out they’re going to run out by the end of the year?” he said. “That’s pretty pathetic.”

McConnell, who now teaches at the University of Houston, doubted that a shutdown of Corpus Christi’s industrial sector would have acute or long-lasting impacts beyond Texas. New producers would fill the gap, while new pipelines and supply chains would bypass the city. 

“It’s a surprise to me that none of those refineries and industries down there have their own desal plants,” said McConnell, who worked 31 years for the chemical manufacturer Praxair in Houston. “They’re using municipal water, for Christ’s sake!”

Rapid Expansion Followed the Shale Boom

The roots of this situation stretch back more than a decade, to the period of rapid downstream industrial expansion that followed the shale revolution in the oilfields of Texas. Strawbridge joined the Port of Corpus Christi Authority in 2015, as a surge of major industrial projects sought to build in the area. Even then, Strawbridge said, everyone knew Corpus Christi needed more water. 

In January 2016, Abbott traveled to Israel, where he toured the world’s largest seawater desalination plant and met with Israeli officials to discuss desalination.

Later that year, an industry group called H2O4Texas, with sponsors including Dow, Chevron and Marathon Oil, hosted an event in Corpus Christi.

“They were basically saying because of the growth in the Coastal Bend, we were gonna need desalination,” said Isabel Araiza, then a professor at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, who attended the event. 

That was the first that Araiza, a Corpus Christi native with a Ph.D. from Boston University, had heard of desalination. She said she was at the meeting for a different reason, finding it strange how many business and political leaders were there. 

The oil and gas industry wanted to build enormous projects in the region, processing oil and gas from Texas’ shale fields into myriad fuels, chemicals and plastics before loading them onto tankers for export. 

In March 2017, then-city manager Margie Rose sent a letter to ExxonMobil, the world’s largest private oil company, that said, “because the City aggressively protects water resources for the future by implementing a matrix of supply strategies, we feel that we have sufficient water supplies to meet your needs.” 

Six days later, the city requested funding from the Texas Water Development Board to study the feasibility and do preliminary design of a seawater desalination plant. 

Around that time, Strawbridge said, “it became very clear to the port authority that there was a difference of opinions as to how much water was available and how much would be needed to continue to attract large industrial investors.” 

“The city felt that it had enough water to last, based on its forecast, until 2040,” Strawbridge said. “We, the port authority, had a very different view of what that demand curve looked like.”

That’s when the port began developing plans for its own desalination plant, he said.

In 2018, a new, interim city manager, Keith Selman, promised another large volume of water to Steel Dynamics, which then built a steel mill in the area. 

The Emerging Solution: Four Desalination Plants

That same year, Corpus Christi created a program exempting the region’s largest industrial water users from water curtailment restrictions during drought for a fee of $0.25 per 1,000 gallons. The city said it would use the money to fund the development of a new water source. The city’s water reservoirs were two thirds full at the time. 

In 2019, the city’s staff presented the City Council with a plan to build a seawater desalination facility. Exxon had taken up the city’s offer for water and planned to build a massive plastics plant called Gulf Coast Growth Ventures in partnership with Saudi Arabia’s national oil company. It would be the largest water user in the region, consuming as much as all city residents combined. 

“Large increases in water demand are projected to occur in 2022,” said a presentation authored by Paulison and given to the City Council by then-Assistant City Manager Mark Van Vleck. “To meet expected water demand, we need to move forward with the procurement of a seawater desalination plant now.”

The plant would produce 10 million gallons per day, cost $140 million and take two years to build, the presentation said. It needed to begin supplying water by the start of 2023. The City Council voted unanimously to move forward.

By 2020 the size of the proposed plant had doubled. “We were recognizing that we’re going to need more water,” said Ronald Barrera, a city council member who has served since 2018. “If we want to expand our economy, then we have to recognize that’s the way to go.”

As the scale of the situation came into focus, the city proposed a second desalination plant, and the port also proposed two. 

Sounding the Alarm

That’s when Encarnacion Serna, a retired chemical plant operations manager, found out about plans for one of those plants just up the shore from his waterfront home on Corpus Christi Bay. 

Serna, an engineer who had worked on reverse osmosis water systems for Valero and Occidental Chemical, reviewed the project’s application. What he saw, he said, astounded him: flimsy assumptions, unrealistic estimates and missing information. 

A facility of that scale, he knew, would require railcars full of pretreatment chemicals, create a mountain of sludge waste every day and consume a tremendous amount of electricity. But he didn’t see serious plans for any of that, he said.  

He dug deeper into the desalination boom and quickly saw what was going on: Politicians and businessmen had oversold their water supply, he said, and were scrambling for more as shortages approached. But none of them had any idea what they were doing, Serna remembered thinking as he reviewed the applications.   

“I’ve been trying since 2020 to let them know how catastrophic this is going to be,” he said in an interview at his home. “They’ve acted with a profound ignorance.”

Serna, a father of four who worked his whole life at chemical plants in Texas, didn’t think any of the proposals would produce as much freshwater as projected, come online as quickly as expected or cost as little as any of the applications stated. These were not going to solve the crisis that officials had teed up, he believed. 

In calls, emails and public comments to city and port officials, Serna raised the alarm at what he saw unfolding. He felt brushed off and soon stopped receiving responses. 

Serna knew that chemical plants and refineries can’t just throttle down water consumption at will. The multi-billion-dollar facilities are meant to operate consistently at a steady state with a set inflow of water. Changing that balance raised risks of explosions. The whole region was skidding toward catastrophe, Serna thought at the time, with no realistic solution in sight. 

In 2022, Gulf Coast Growth Ventures, the Exxon-Saudi partnership, began to draw water while the desalination facility meant to supply it still didn’t even exist on paper. 

Strawbridge, then CEO of the Port of Corpus Christi Authority, insisted a private desalination operator should build and run a large facility that could sell its water to the city. But the city wanted to operate its own. Strawbridge considered the location of the city’s project unsuitable. Both sides said the other took steps to undermine the project.

Meanwhile, veteran local scientists rejected environmental studies from developers claiming the massive discharge of brine from the plants wouldn’t turn the coastal bays and estuaries into hypersaline wastelands.

“I’ve read the engineering studies,” said Paul Montagna, an endowed chair at the Harte Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi, in a 2022 interview with Inside Climate News. “And I just don’t get it.”

Environmentalists organized against the plants. Araiza, the college professor who attended the first desalination meeting, had become a leader among groups that were fighting desalination as a means to resist the onslaught of petrochemical projects in their area, which they saw as wealthy, outside interests swooping in to hijack their resources, institutions and environment. 

“They really thought it was just going to be a yes,” she said from her office at Del Mar College, beneath a poster of Che Guevara. “I think we helped slow things down.”

Barrera, the City Council member, started to feel uneasy as controversy and constant turnover on the council seemed to leave them unable to push the project forward.

“I’ve been accused of being a fearmonger,” he said in an interview at his office in downtown Corpus Christi. “Now everybody’s scared.”

It All Falls Apart

Strawbridge took an entourage of about 30 Texas lawmakers, businessmen and lobbyists to Israel in November 2022 to visit desalination facilities “to see that it is possible to solve for our water issues,” he said. 

Strawbridge encouraged the lawmakers to support the port’s development of a private desalination plant, which he said was urgently needed to cover for the failures of the city. But he drew public outrage from city officials when he applied for state funding for a facility that struck them as a competitor to theirs. 

Strawbridge said the trip to Israel ultimately led the Texas lawmakers to pass legislation in 2023 that created the state’s $1 billion water fund. 

But the trip, not disclosed to the public at the time, ultimately ignited a scandal that led to Strawbridge’s resignation when an investigation by KRIS 6 revealed that the Port, which is not a taxing entity, spent more than $200,000 taking the crew to Israel. The station described “a pattern of lavish spending” on that trip and in prior port activities. 

Strawbridge earned $750,000 in the prior year and had expensed an average of $10,000 per month on food and alcohol, including parties. One day later, Strawbridge resigned, but maintained that all expenses were incurred properly through his work representing the Port.

In an interview, he characterized the report and scandal as “a hit job” by political opponents and “an effort to hasten my departure from the Port.” 

“They used the expenses from the Israel trip as a basis for smearing my good name, although the trip ultimately proved fortuitous for the state and its water funding,” Strawbridge said. “Ultimately an independent audit of the previous five years of my expenses found absolutely no irregularities or departures from policy. But of course that wasn’t covered by KRIS 6.”

That year, 2023, was the hottest on record in Texas. Water levels in Corpus Christi reservoirs continued to plummet as the drought intensified. Desalination had moved to the center of Corpus Christi’s public conversation. Local politicians spoke for or against it while activists flocked to city council meetings and permit hearings.

“Blessed be the environmentalists,” said Serna, the retired engineer. “But 90 percent of them don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.” 

In January 2024, Corpus Christi City Council produced a new cost estimate for its proposed desalination plant of about $550 million to produce 30 million gallons of freshwater per day. 

“These numbers are ridiculously low, fraudulent and deceitful,” wrote Serna in an email to city officials. 

By that time, Serna was angry. The subject line of his email read: “The Legacy of the Imbeciles.” 

Where was the city even getting this cost estimate from, he asked, if it “does not have engineering and construction drawings.”

“All the city has at this time are deficits and bills incurred by lunatics in the millions of dollars already spent in the pursuit of this Scam project with nothing tangible on hand yet,” Serna wrote. 

Later that year, a new cost estimate put the project at nearly $760 million. Another estimate, in July 2025, said $1.2 billion. 

Two months later, Corpus Christi City Council, dominated by newly elected members and unable to stomach the cost, voted to cancel the project after a rancorous, 12-hour public meeting that broke repeatedly into yelling from the audience. By then, the Port of Corpus Christi Authority also handed off one of its desalination projects to the nearby Nueces River Authority and mothballed another.

Corpus Christi city leaders expressed optimism over plans to quickly pipe in groundwater from the Evangeline Aquifer about 20 miles away. But when users of that water, like the small city of Sinton, requested in February 2026 that an administrative law judge review Corpus Christi’s groundwater permits, hope faded for a timely solution, other than hurricane-scale rainfall.  

“Let the shit hit the fan,” said Serna. “Let dog eat dog.”

What does he think will happen to Corpus Christi? In time, he said, the refineries and chemical plants will probably build their own water projects, somehow, and possibly restart their facilities that they will have to mothball in the meantime.  

For residents, he said, life might be like it used to be for him, 70 years ago, as a boy in the Rio Grande Valley, when he would hang plastic jugs on mesquite branches and carry them on his shoulder to ask nearby companies for water. 

“This is the legacy of the imbeciles,” he said.

The ongoing Iran war is a rare modern conflict where warring powers can in an unprecedented manner (generally-speaking in terms of the modern age) address each other directly over social media. For example Iranian top official accounts are busy trying to troll Washington in defiance, even as the US bombs fall. “9 days into Operation Epic Mistake, oil prices have doubled while all commodities are skyrocketing. We know the U.S. is plotting against our oil and nuclear sites in hopes of containing huge inflationary shock. Iran is fully prepared. And we, too, have many surprises in store,” Iran Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote on X Monday.

But President Trump on the same day had his own card to play, highlighting the plight of the Iranian National Women’s Soccer team, which appears stuck in increasingly sensitive and possibly dangerous situation after playing in Australia. Trump wrote: “Australia is making a terrible humanitarian mistake by allowing the Iran National Woman’s Soccer team to be forced back to Iran, where they will most likely be killed. Don’t do it, Mr. Prime Minister, give ASYLUM. The U.S. will take them if you won’t.”

Stretching back days, and weeks – even before the start of Operation Epic Fury – there were conflicting reports over the team’s response during the singing of the national anthem. There are widespread headlines they have been refusing to sing the national anthem, resulting in threats from Tehran officials.

At this point it remains anything but clear whether the entire team is requesting asylum, or whether just several individuals are. Australian broadcast reports say at least five are in hiding:

Five female soccer players who it was feared would face persecution when they returned to Iran have left their accommodation in the Gold Coast and plan to seek asylum in Australia, multiple sources have told the ABC. 

Fatemeh Pasandideh, Zahra Ghanbari, Zahra Sarbali, Atefeh Ramazanzadeh, and Mona Hamoudi, who all play for the Iran women’s national football team, refused to sing the national anthem before their opening match with South Korea at the Women’s Asian Cup earlier this month.

Fears had been growing they would be targeted by the Iranian regime upon their return, after they were labelled “traitors” on Iranian state TV. 

Now, a family member of one of the athletes, who we have agreed not to name, and activists within the Iranian Australian community have told the ABC the players have evaded the team’s handlers and are being protected by police in Queensland. 

Trump says PM Albanese is “on it”….

The NY Times and others have since reported that an Australian government representative is in contact with the five, and has briefed them on their options. The pressure on the ladies grows, at a moment their homeland – and possibly their own family members – are under US-Israeli bombs.

Some intense public scenes have played out after the team lost its last group match at the Women’s Asian Cup on Sunday. “Just 24 hours earlier, Australian protesters laid siege to a tour bus transporting Iranian female soccer players,” one foremost Australian broadcaster reported.

Many among the crowd that rushed the bus carried pre-Islamic revolution Iran flags, and are apparently pro-monarchy Iranians which make up part of the diaspora. 

Some of the chaotic scenes, which have been seized upon by Pro-Pahlavi oppositionists…

Iranian football fans plead with Australia “Save our Girls” as they surround a bus transporting the Iranian National Women’s Football Team.

The team defiantly refused to sing the Islamic Republic national anthem and could face severe retribution if they return to Iran. pic.twitter.com/kYIKrTev0z

— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) March 9, 2026

While it’s becoming clear the team could face threats from there own government at home – if not also the pressing threat of US-Israeli bombs from the sky, Al Jazeera has made clear that at least some of them want to urgently be reunited with their families at home:

While the players have not publicly aired any concerns for their own safety, they have spoken about the difficulty of playing in a tournament thousands of kilometers away from home while being “fully disconnected” from their families during the US-Israeli attacks.

Their head coach, Marziyeh Jafari, has been quoted as saying by Australian media that the players want to return to Iran “as soon as we can”.

“I want to be with my country and home. … We are eager to come back,” the Australian Associated Press quoted Jafari as saying in a postmatch news conference.

Without doubt, the international media spotlight looks to make their plight and decision-making even more difficult – again, also as people in Tehran take notice:

Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting presenter Mohammad Reza Shahbazi said in a video that the players showed a lack of patriotism and their actions amounted to the “pinnacle of dishonour” in footage that circulated widely on social media.

Shahbazi then stressed what is likely the prevailing Iranian government view at this moment: “Let me just say one thing: Traitors during wartime must be dealt with more severely.”

These and other comments have caused opposition voices to warn that the Woman’s Soccer Team might not only face scrutiny, investigation, and harassment upon returning home – but possibly even death, should they be deemed ‘traitors’. 

Authored by Petr Svab via The Epoch Times,

The FBI has collected a large volume of Arizona election records from the state’s Senate as part of a grand jury investigation. The subpoena indicates a broader scope of the investigation into irregularities in the 2020 election.

The records pertain to the Arizona State Senate’s 2020 audit of Maricopa County, according to a March 9 X post by the Senate’s president, Warren Petersen. The county, where nearly two-thirds of Arizonans live, has been at the center of multiple controversies, including unsuccessful litigation by multiple Republican campaigns.

The subpoena, first reported by Just the News, was confirmed to The Epoch Times by a source familiar with the investigation. The large volume of electronic data includes ballots and voter records, according to the source.

The grand jury probe may indicate a wider investigation. In January, the FBI raided election offices of Fulton County, Georgia, which covers the broader Atlanta area, as part of a criminal investigation into potential violations of federal law. Concerned citizens have discovered a plethora of problems with the county’s 2020 election. Even if the issues didn’t affect the election’s outcome, they may still amount to criminal violations, said the search warrant’s affidavit, released last month.

The problems included chain of custody failures and duplicate ballot images, as well as incorrectly reported recount results.

The Trump administration has been moving aggressively to probe election law compliance.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is suing at least 29 states for voter records that contain non-public information, particularly driver’s license numbers or last four digits of the social security number. The DOJ stated it has lawful authority to review the records to check for compliance with federal election laws. States, mostly those run by Democrats, have argued various state laws and privacy concerns prevent them from sharing the data.

President Donald Trump has maintained that in 2020, election victory was stolen from him. His lawyers vigorously and unsuccessfully challenged the results. Since then, Republican states have significantly tightened election rules while the Democratic ones have generally moved in the opposite direction.

Trump is also pushing a sweeping election reform bill, the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to present proof of citizenship, such as a passport or a birth certificate, to register to vote. The GOP-controlled House passed the bill last month. But Senate Republicans only have 53 votes, seven short of overcoming the filibuster. They remain divided on whether to abolish the rule.

Democrats have called the bill an attempt at voter suppression.

President Donald Trump’s forthcoming high-stakes visit to China will be restricted to Beijing alone due to both a demanding schedule and heightened security concerns, according to a report in the South China Morning Post.

“Unfortunately, his schedule is very tight. There is no room to squeeze in a visit to a second city,” one source told the SCMP.

“While the schedule is tight, security is also a top concern,” another source told the newspaper. “Adding a second destination will likely compromise security and create a logistical nightmare, so both sides agreed that the visit will be in Beijing only. There is a chance for Trump to visit Shenzhen during Apec [in November], so why hurry?”

“Given the situation [in the Middle East], the visit’s security arrangements must be extremely careful but we are very confident that the summit will be a success,” another source told the newspaper.

The White House has confirmed that Trump will travel to China from March 31 to April 2, marking the president’s first visit to the country since 2017.

Recent U.S.-Israeli military strikes on Iran, which resulted in the death of the regime’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei, have had only a “very limited” effect on preparations for the summit, according to SCMP’s sources.

The visit will come as the U.S. and China seek to preserve a fragile trade truce. The pause in escalation stems from a meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the 2025 APEC summit in Busan, South Korea. After months of rising tariffs, restrictions on rare-earth exports, and agricultural boycotts, the two leaders agreed to a one-year truce that eased pressures on the global economy’s two largest players.

“There seems to be a really strong appetite to maintain that fragile trade truce that we saw struck in late 2025,” Nick Marro, global trade lead at the Economist Intelligence Unit, told SCMP. “I think, at best, we could see this continuation of a detente in tariff policy.”

Trump has characterized the 2025 deal as a “massive victory,” highlighting reductions in certain U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods (from around 57% to 47% in key areas like fentanyl-related levies), while China pledged to resume substantial purchases of American soybeans, sorghum, and other agricultural products, suspend new rare-earth restrictions, and cooperate on curbing fentanyl flows.

The Busan accord provided breathing room for American farmers and manufacturers, halted further escalation, and created space for potential longer-term talks – even as underlying structural disputes over technology and supply chains persist.

“Both sides will look for deliverables that can be packaged as wins they can present at home,” Wang Dan, China director at Eurasia Group, told SCMP, adding, “This could include numerical commitments for soybeans, energy and manufactured goods from the US.”

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

This week, thousands of workers are receiving pink slips. They are not being let go due to inflation or outsourcing to foreign countries. To the contrary, they are being fired because booming sectors of the economy no longer need them. Indeed, it is an economy that may need fewer and fewer humans.

Amazon this week announced further job cuts due to robotics and AI. Recently, Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, announced that his company Block would be laying off 40 percent of its employees. He cited AI as reducing the need for human employees.

In my book, “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution,” I discuss not just the economic changes unfolding due to AI and robotics but also the political implications of those changes for the American republic.

These economic changes are unfolding all around us. We are looking at one of the greatest job losses in history.

In a free-market system, such technological changes tend to offset losses with new jobs in emerging industries. And there will be such growth with the AI and robotic revolutions. But it is also likely that we are looking at a static class of unemployed and practically unemployable citizens as this new revolution unfolds.

“Low-skill jobs are the most likely to be replaced by a robotic workforce,” I write in the book.

“Amazon warehouses are now entirely mechanized with twelve different types of over seven thousand robots moving rapidly to collect and direct goods where hundreds of people were once employed.”

But what is most notable about the Amazon announcement is that these were white-collar jobs. The impact of AI is not confined to factory workers and truck drivers.

The danger is that politicians will react predictably and try to subsidize jobs that are no longer viable and industries that are being dramatically downsized. At the same time, they are likely to expand model programs in Democratic cities for universal basic or guaranteed income.

Democrats have moved forward with more than 60 bills creating such programs, and this week, Cook County, Ill. (the second-largest county in the U.S.) made permanent the universal basic income program it had originally launched with federal COVID-19 relief funds.

The problem is the creation of what I call a “kept citizenship” in a republic designed for people who are economically and politically independent from the government.

That system is seriously undermined by a large percentage of citizens living off the government dole.

The solution cannot be an “arts-and-crafts” population kept entertained by government programs to learn glassblowing and pottery-making.

A different type of citizen would emerge that is unlikely to be sufficiently free of the government to counter its excesses or failures.

“Rage and the Republic” lays out what I call a “liberty-enhancing economy.” It notes that this is not just the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence but the 250th anniversary of the release of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The founders immediately embraced Smith’s economic theories as the perfect companion for their political theories. They believed that true freedom requires economic independence from government.

That means accepting the economic changes and the loss of certain jobs. AI and robotics will largely wipe out certain jobs from taxi drivers to radiologists to warehouse workers. Meanwhile, we need to focus on homocentric jobs. In the book, I called these “Guinan jobs” after the bartender on the starship Enterprise in “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” As a kid, I was always confused by Guinan (played by Whoopi Goldberg), who would mix a drink next to a replicator that could produce the perfect Romulan cocktail every time without fail or variation. Customers clearly wanted Guinan to make the cocktail, even if it is not perfect every time.

The question I ask is, how many “Guinan jobs” are out there. There are many, including teachers, psychiatrists and lawyers, who will be affected but likely not eliminated by AI. We will still want humans in these positions.

All governments will face this existential crisis in the 21st Century. It will create growing instability globally. Although AI and robotics will make goods cheaper and more widely available, they are also likely to have a dramatic effect on populations. For example, as production costs drop with the new technology, there will be less advantage to moving factories to other countries with cheaper labor forces, such as China and Mexico.

Companies may choose to build near consumer markets to save on transportation costs while utilizing higher-skilled worker populations to maintain robotic and AI systems. That could produce massive unemployment in certain countries with low-educated, low-income populations. That in turn could destabilize governments and increase the chances of war in countries with large populations of unemployed young men.

I also do not feel great optimism for global governance systems like the European Union. The EU has largely eviscerated the elements I identify in the American Revolution as producing the oldest and most stable democratic system. Although global governance is likely to increase, it could fail spectacularly due to its inherent instabilities.

In the U.S., this period of economic change is likely to fuel calls for socialist policies. Socialism has always thrived on economic upheavals. Indeed, socialists often use their own failures to further collectivize or centralize economies.

Our republic is uniquely situated to not only survive but to thrive in the 21st Century. It was conceived in and designed for changing economic conditions. But if we are to survive, we must remain faithful to the constitutional structure that has afforded us stability for more than two centuries. Despite calls to trash the Constitution, pack the Supreme Court and change our political system, these protections are the very things that can get us through this century intact.

The Founders designed our Republic to prevent the tendency of democracies to become what one called a “mobocracy.” They knew that political and economic instability could create a form of “democratic despotism” in which democracies devoured themselves.

We have a system that has overcome challenges — from redcoats to robots — that have crushed other countries. However, we must remember who we are. Our nation, created in the winds of change by a free and industrious people, need not fear change. It is a system designed for bad times, not good times. The true crisis is a crisis of faith being fueled by some in academia and in the media.

This republic will survive so long as it does not die by our own hand.

Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the author of the New York Times bestselling “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.“

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

Travelers in the United States are facing significant delays at airports due to the ongoing federal government shutdown, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) stated on March 8 in a post on social media.

“Today, travelers are facing TSA lines of up to nearly 3 hours long at some major airports,” said Lauren Bis, deputy assistant secretary for public affairs at TSA, on X.

This has resulted in “missed flights and massive delays during peak travel.”

Referring to TSA officers, Bis said, “These frontline heroes received only partial paychecks earlier this month and now face their first full missed paycheck, leading to financial hardship, absences, and crippling staffing shortages,” and called on Democrats to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

A recent travel update issued by William P. Hobby Airport in Houston, Texas, shared by DHS, stated that passengers should arrive at least four to five hours before flight departure to allow enough time for TSA screening, with estimated wait times for the screening exceeding 180 minutes or 2.5 hours.

“Houston Airports urges passengers to remain flexible as the government shutdown may impact security operations from one day—and even one shift—to the next,” the post stated, advising travelers to get in touch with their airlines for further support.

The federal shutdown, which began on Feb. 14, is in its 23rd day. DHS funding issues arising from the shutdown have resulted in staff shortages.

On March 5, the House of Representatives passed a bill to fund DHS. The vote was 221–209, with four Democrats joining all Republicans in voting for it.

However, Senate Democrats blocked the funding legislation, which received 51 votes with 45 opposed. Sixty votes are needed for the spending bill to move forward.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection, which are part of DHS, are funded through 2029 under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. However, TSA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Coast Guard, are impacted.

Democrats have demanded certain conditions that primarily apply to ICE operations to be met before allowing the funding bill to pass.

These include limiting immigration enforcement to targeted operations, requiring judicial warrants before entering private property, ending what they describe as indiscriminate arrests, verifying citizenship before detention, requiring agents to clearly identify themselves, and restricting operations in locations like churches, schools, and medical facilities.

Flight Delays

As of Sunday at 9:40 p.m. ET, there have been 7,233 flight delays and 673 cancellations at U.S. airports, according to data from FlightAware. On March 7, there were 9,693 delays and 1,339 cancellations.

George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH) in Houston asked passengers in a post on X to arrive early to make time for TSA clearance.

The Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, which serves New Orleans and the Gulf Coast Region, said in a March 8 post on X that there were “longer-than-average lines” at the airport due to a shortage of TSA workers.

The airport advised passengers to arrive at least three hours prior to their scheduled departure time to make sure there is enough time for security screening.

The Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport also issued a warning in an X post, saying passengers could expect longer wait times at TSA checkpoints due to staffing constraints and the “residual impacts from two ground stops issued Friday.”

The Austin-Bergstrom International Airport had warned back in a March 5 post on social media that “unanticipated delays” could occur due to the partial federal shutdown.

In a March 8 statement, Chris Sununu, the CEO of Airlines for America, a trade association of leading U.S. airlines, said that TSA officers are facing a $0 paycheck this week and that the DHS shutdown was causing “significant strains” across the aviation system.

At some airports, TSA lines are two hours to three hours long, resulting in flights being delayed and passengers missing their timely travel, the CEO said.

“The shutdown is having very real consequences, and hardworking federal aviation workers, the airline industry and our passengers are being used as a political football once again. This is simply unacceptable and un-American,” Sununu said.

“We are in spring break travel season and expecting record numbers of people to take to the skies. Airlines have done their part to prepare; now Congress and the administration must act with urgency to reach a deal that reopens DHS and ends this shutdown. America’s transportation security workforce is too important to be used as political leverage.”

West Texas Intermediate crude futures spiked as high as $111 a barrel on Sunday evening as the deepening Middle East conflict sent panic through oil markets, with supplies from key Gulf producers going offline and the Strait of Hormuz remaining paralyzed into week two.

The key question on some energy desks is whether this energy shock will force President Trump to scale back Operation Epic Fury in a TACO-style retreat by Tuesday with WTI in triple-digit territory. That is hard to say, given that U.S. Central Command stated on X over the weekend that the operation will only accelerate from here.

But BofA’s Michael Hartnett suggests a de-escalation of the Iran war in March (read the note). That’s because Trump’s approval ratings for the economy (40%) and inflation (36%) are back at their lows.

The larger concern now, beyond the energy market, is the risk of a global spillover. As Jared Cohen, President of Global Affairs and Co-Head of the Goldman Sachs Global Institute, warned investors on the GS Weekend Macro Call, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps maintains cells across multiple emerging market countries and could begin activating them.

“What I am looking for next is that they have meaningful cells in the Tri-Border Area of Latin America, West Africa, and elsewhere. They could hit an embassy, they could hit a consulate, or they could hit a cultural center in any one of the twelve countries they have already attacked,” Cohen explained. 

He continued, “They could do something in Europe. They could carry out a meaningful cyberattack. Right now, in the Strait of Hormuz, they have essentially blocked it by driving up insurance costs. They could still mine it. And the Houthis have not done anything yet in the Red Sea. You could also see something involving undersea cables, where 80% of Europe-Asia internet traffic flows.”

“So that’s kind of what I’m watching for,” Cohen told clients. However, he didn’t mention in that thought of whether terror fallouts would wash up on the shores of the U.S. Homeland, given the illegal alien invasion by the Democrats under the Biden-Harris administration. 

The U.S. Homeland has already had a few wakeup calls:

• Operation Epic Fury Sparks Homeland Terror Fears Amid Fallout From Biden’s Illegal Alien Invasion

• Two Radicals Arrested After Targeting Anti-Islam NYC Protest With Shrapnel-Packed Devices

While JPMorgan analysts are closely watching the risk of Gulf oil shut-ins exceeding 4 million barrels per day by the end of next week, Cohen’s role at Goldman is to focus on geopolitical risk, and anyone who heard his webinar this weekend would come away with the view that spillover risks ex-Middle East could soon be a major risk. 

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

Farther Along

Don’t lose the plot. Embrace the suck. This is the world’s hard time, for now. The birth of anything can be a bloody horror. It can even look like death. Don’t be too afraid to see what comes on the other side of this awful spectacle.

So many Americans are rooting and wishing for the Iran war to turn out badly for Western Civ. And why? Because Trump. And why? Because at the same time he is ending Iran’s long-running nuclear blackmail game, he is terminating the rackets of the Democratic Party. The incipient changes in operational order create new categories of winners and losers.

Now you know why Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists run on the same track as America’s Woke-Jacobin-Marxists, including the pitifully deluded wine ladies of posh West LA, Grosse Point, Beacon Hill, Fairfax County, et cetera, whose brains have been hijacked by the cable news demon factory (and their sponsors). Chaos does everything possible to avoid meeting order.

And this is why passing the SAVE Act is as consequential as ridding the Middle East of its chief chaos agent. Do you realize how perfectly insane our country’s election procedure has become? The fraud is titanic and right in your face, and the remedy is so plain and simple. What possible excuse is there to thwart it? Non-citizens have no right to vote. Mail-in ballots are patently subject to chicanery. Vote tabulation machines are demonstrably hackable. 80-percent of Americans know this is the truth. How is there controversy over this?

How? Because among all the broken institutions in our country, Congress is the worst. The Congress of our time is demonstrating that we might not be worthy of governing ourselves. We are at a cycle-low for public rectitude. Anything goes and nothing matters as long as the campaign contributions keep rolling in.

You see how this has been going.

But mark this: we are going to get election reform one way or another. It’s that urgent, and failure to accomplish it by legislation will warrant a national emergency. And when the election machinery has been fixed, we had better do something about the plague of corporate money that runs like poison through our politics because of the Supreme Court’s foolish decision in the 2010 Citizens United case. They decided (by a slim 5-4 majority) that limitless campaign contributions by corporations amounted to free speech under the Constitution.

I will tell you concisely why this was tragically fallacious. Free speech in our country is a God-given right of sovereign citizens. Corporations are not citizens. Corporations don’t have obligations, duties, and responsibilities to the public interest (a.k.a. the common good). Corporations explicitly, by law, have obligations, duties, and responsibilities solely to their share-holders. The interests of corporate share-holders and the nation’s public interest are manifestly oppositional. Perhaps now you can see why this was such a dreadful invitation to political chaos.

So, Mr. Trump, for all his flaws, attempts to bring order out of chaos at home and in global relations, and the agents of chaos mightily resent the shut-down of their precious chaos. With Iran, it has come to fighting fire with fire. It’s unlikely that most of the people in that country seek to become martyrs. The cult of martyrdom is strictly the business of the maniacs who seized power there in 1979, a reign of terror, extended by proxy around the whole Middle East and beyond.

Entwined with Iran’s oil business, and the energy security of many nations, the mullahs inflect the trade of this primary resource with their chaos. The world cannot cope with chaos in the oil trade. The collapsing regime of the mullahs wants to go out turning the entire world into a martyr. Just like the Democratic Party wants to martyr the founding principles of the USA to preserve its matrix of moneygrubbing and power-seeking.

These are two forces that require the most severe discipline and Mr. Trump is acting to impose exactly that. It’s painful to witness, but it must happen if we want to continue the human project as a reality-based enterprise.

So, heed what is at stake in the events unspooling. This is a dark moment in a journey back to daylight. Have faith. As the old American hymn goes: Farther along we’ll know more about it; farther along we’ll understand why.

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

Ten days into the U.S.-Israeli Operation Epic Fury against Iran, which has forced shut-ins at major Gulf oil and gas facilities, disrupted production at key oil fields, sent stockpiles soaring, sparked a global energy crisis (Brent crude hit $119/bbl highs overnight) and severely disrupted commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most critical energy chokepoint, new satellite imagery data from TankerTrackers, first cited by Bloomberg, suggests Tehran has recently moved substantial volumes of crude through the waterway.

Geospatial intelligence data from TankerTrackers estimates that Iran-linked tanker flows through the Strait of Hormuz have topped nearly 12 million barrels since Feb. 28, the start of Operation Epic Fury. Because the data is delayed, updated satellite imagery may only suggest that the actual figure is much higher.

More like nothing on AIS. https://t.co/MkBEH2lA5f

— TankerTrackers.com, Inc. (@TankerTrackers) March 8, 2026

TankerTrackers’ data is notable because much of the traffic through Hormuz has been paralyzed, sending Brent crude futures to nearly $120/bbl in overnight trading. The firm’s data is useful for tracking Iran-linked dark fleet tankers that switch off their transponders.

On X, TankerTrackers reported that a Suezmax tanker that recently went dark by switching off its transponder while transiting the Strait has switched it back on and is now headed to India.

UPDATE: One of the Suezmax tankers has now appeared back on AIS, and is approaching Mumbai, India with a million barrels of Saudi crude oil. Her name is SHENLONG (9379210). There are still a few more which may appear on AIS given that at least one of them is heading to China. pic.twitter.com/MFqnjpkuCe

— TankerTrackers.com, Inc. (@TankerTrackers) March 9, 2026

Two days before Operation Epic Fury began, we told readers that Iran was rushing crude onto tankers in anticipation of an incoming conflict.

We noted last week that as long as Iranian crude continues to flow, pressure will only build on the Trump administration to address Kharg Island, Tehran’s main export hub, where roughly 80% to 90% of the country’s crude is loaded onto tankers.

• Kharg Island Back In Focus As Seizure Talk Enters Mainstream Media Debate

• The Oil Island That Could Break Iran

Kharg Island remains one of the IRGC’s most important financial lifelines, and if the administration is serious about dismantling the regime’s funding pipeline, the export island will become difficult to ignore. Whether that means bombing it, seizing it, or pursuing some other option is a separate question entirely. But we do think the conversation will soon shift to pathways for the US to control Kharg Island.