The head of the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) said Sunday that a chemical storage tank in Southern California that has forced officials to declare an emergency and prompted evacuation orders for tens of thousands residents is likely to fail.

Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the EPA, told CNN’s “State of the Union” program on Sunday that the “most likely scenario” is a “low-volume release” of the tank, where officials will be able to “monitor, neutralize, and contain the threat.”

“The Orange County Fire Authority is working to keep the temperature of the tank down. That is very important,” he said on CNN, referring to the fire department in the Southern California county.

He said keeping the temperature under 85 degrees F is key.

But, as Jack Phillips reports for The Epoch Times, Zeldin warned:

“We’re being told that the tank will fail, but there are different scenarios as to what that means, the most catastrophic scenario being an explosion that results in other tanks to explode. That’s the reason why you see such a big evacuation that’s been done in the surrounding areas.”

“You have all levels of government, local, state, federal, working together. EPA has personnel on the ground, air monitors deployed in the local community,” Zeldin also said.

“We have been involved in the modeling of different scenarios.”

Drones were monitoring temperatures at 10-minute intervals to watch for any spikes and planning was underway to ensure a possible leak could quickly be prevented from spreading into waterways or the ocean, Covey said in a video released online.

“Sitting back and allowing these tanks to fail is unacceptable,” Covey said, adding there was no guarantee tanks will not breach and leak.

“Our goal is to protect your homes—no damage to them—and protect the environment.”

As of Sunday morning, Zeldin said: “This is an emergency response. This isn’t yet an environmental response, and the scale of that environmental response will be determined based off of what happens when that tank fails.”

As a result of these warnings, Phillips reports that California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in Orange County.

“The safety of Orange County residents is the top priority. We are mobilizing every state resource available to support local responders and make sure the community has what they need to stay safe,” Newsom said.

The malfunctioning tank holds approximately 5,000 to 7,000 gallons of methyl methacrylate, a flammable and volatile chemical used in plastics manufacturing for aerospace applications.

The tank, located at a manufacturing facility in Garden Grove, first started displaying signs of instability on Thursday.

On Friday, there were increased fears of an explosion, according to Orange County Fire Authority interim Chief TJ McGovern.

Approximately 50,000 residents were evacuated in Garden Grove, which is home to around 172,000 people and located 30 miles south of Los Angeles.

The governor’s proclamation directs all state agencies and the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services to support Orange County and impacted areas, and unlocks additional emergency response resources and authorities.

Authored by Murray Lytle via The Epoch Times,

Are Canadians less adventurous than they once were? It’s hard to argue otherwise.

Alexander Mackenzie was only 24 when the North West Company named him chief fur trader at Fort Chipewyan, in what is now Alberta. A few years later, in 1789 he travelled north along what is now known as the Mackenzie River to become the first European to reach the Arctic Ocean overland. Four years later he crossed the Rocky Mountains and was the first European to reach the Pacific Ocean, beating Americans Merriweather Lewis and William Clark by a full dozen years.

In 1898, Martha Purdy arrived in Dawson City to escape a failed marriage and make her fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush. It was while climbing the notorious Chilkoot Pass that she discovered she was pregnant with her third son. She later remarried and, as Martha Black, was the second woman to be elected to Canada’s Parliament. She was also a successful entrepreneur and a world-renowned expert on wild flowers.

Canadian history is filled with tales such as these. Explorers, soldiers, settlers, and other restless souls who endured great hardships and did great things.

There is a natural sense of awe that arises when retelling such lives filled with adventure. To our modern selves, they appear as fascinating aberrations, gifted men and women with unusual appetites for risky or dangerous undertakings. Their willingness to set out into the unknown strikes us today as thrilling, unnerving, and more than a bit foolhardy. But while their accomplishments may be striking, they lived in more adventurous times.

Today, society shrinks from adventure and the unknown.

Through a combination of practical circumstances, changing social standards, and dramatic shifts in individual risk tolerance and government behaviour, opportunities for adventure have been drastically curtailed.

How can Canadians get that sense of adventurousness back?

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered”, G.K. Chesterton once wrote. “An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” There is a case to be made that adventures are simply harder to come by these days.

There are no more blank spaces left on maps, and hence no places for modern-day Mackenzies to discover.

The omnipresence of the internet and GPS similarly makes it almost impossible to get truly lost anymore. And if you do, help is usually close at hand.

Beyond these practical limitations, however, it seems incontestable that society today is less interested in promoting, facilitating, or participating in adventurous life experiences.

No one talks of running away with the circus or joining the French Foreign Legion anymore, even in jest. According to Statistics Canada, twice as many millennials are still living at home as was the case with previous generations. And if any of these young adults do go away, it’s more than likely to be an adventureless “gap year” holiday between graduate degrees recorded in minute detail on Snapchat and Instagram.

The perpetual childhood of today’s younger generations contrasts sharply with the youthful accomplishments of past eras. William Wilberforce, for example, was elected to the British Parliament at age 21 and then proved instrumental in ending the trans-Atlantic slave trade. His friend William Pitt became Prime Minister at 24, and spent his career fighting the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, who became a general at 24. Quite a lot can be accomplished when one starts early.

Other factors that limit the availability of adventure in our post-modern era include the suffocating impact of the welfare state. When Mackenzie left his family home at 15 to become an apprentice in the fur industry, it was because he had little choice. He needed to make his way in the world as a teenager. The same urgency applied to Black when she decided to escape a failed marriage by travelling to the Yukon. With no government to hold your hand, adventure follows. Popular culture in earlier eras also did its bit as well by celebrating explorers and adventurers as celebrities in the same manner that we laud singers and athletes today.

Just as adventure was once regarded as a social virtue to be admired, society today aggressively enforces the opposite expectation—that it is our duty to avoid risk at all costs. In their 2021 book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and lawyer Greg Lukianoff take a close look at the impact of a creeping safety culture on the behaviour of younger generations.

Children, the authors observed, are now deliberately shielded from any sense of risk or uncertainty. How can anyone—young boys most of all—learn about the world around them when school principals announce at the onset of every snowfall that “all snow must stay on the ground.” The ideal of adventure and resilience has been replaced by a debilitating sense of fragility and risk-avoidance.

So is the dream of looking over an untravelled horizon that animated people like Alexander Mackenzie or Martha Black completely dead in the 21st century? Not exactly.

Adventure should properly be considered a spirit, not a place.

It is driven by a powerful mixture of curiosity, necessity, and an openness to experiencing new things. And it can be found wherever uncertainty reigns. Today, that might entail travelling to strange lands, meeting new people, or even engaging in uncomfortable discussions about whether Alberta should remain part of Canada forever.

Wherever the unknown lies, adventure can be found.

Authored by Kay Rubacek via The Epoch Times,

Two billboards went up in New York City recently. This is a city of advertising, where images appear when someone wants the whole world to see them. One billboard is selling artificial intelligence, and the other is warning about it. The juxtaposition between these two advertisers, who most likely wouldn’t have seen the other’s message in advance, captures the conflict of our times and cements the uncertainty about the future within an artificial intelligence world.

The selling billboard is dark, purple, and almost cinematic.

An AI-generated face with artificial perfection stares out. Three words above her say: “Stop Hiring Humans.” The Era of AI Employees Is Here. The company is Artisan. The company says it “is a provocation. It works because it’s uncomfortable.” It is real. It wants your payroll budget, and it is not embarrassed to say so.

The warning billboard is light, purple, and funny in the way that grief sometimes is. A sad stick figure holds a small sign: Will Create 4 Food. Mock chat bubbles float across it like a corporate memo from a future that has already arrived: “Thank you artists for donating your life’s work to our AI. Your generosity hasn’t gone unnoticed. Just uncompensated.”

The organization’s name is Replacement.AI. It is also real, but it is not selling anything. It is run by anonymous artists who spent their own money to tell you the truth. Their website calls itself “the only honest AI company.” Its homepage reads: Humans no longer necessary. Stupid. Smelly. Squishy. It’s time for a machine solution.

The quotes on the site are genuine, such as one from OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman: “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.” And another from OpenAI’s charter, “To build ‘highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.’”

On the page dedicated to artists, the site reads: “If you’re one of the millions of artists, musicians, writers, journalists, scholars, or other creatives whose work we’ve stolen to train our AI, we want to thank you. We couldn’t have achieved a $100 billion valuation without all of your hard work, just sitting on the internet for us and our other AI company friends to scrape. Unfortunately for you, financial compensation is out of the question. Just because we’re making money from your copyrighted material doesn’t mean you’re legally entitled to any of it.”

It is satire. It is also accurate. In a submission to the House of Lords, OpenAI admitted, “It would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.”

The courts are beginning to agree too that something was taken. Well over thirty copyright infringement lawsuits have been filed by creators against AI developers. Visual artists sued Stability AI and Midjourney. Getty Images sued, arguing that over twelve million photographs were scraped without license. The New York Times sued OpenAI. Universal Music filed a $3.1 billion lawsuit against Anthropic in January 2026, alleging its AI was built on a foundation of piracy. None of these cases have reached final verdicts. The legal system is moving at human speed through a problem that was created at machine speed.

What passed through a million years of accumulated human experience—the knowledge handed from mind to mind, generation to generation, the grief and wonder pressed into stories and paintings and films and arguments on the internet at three in the morning—was consumed by hungry algorithms. There was no purchase or licensing. The great ingestion happened in server rooms, while the rest of us were clicking I Agree to ever-lengthening terms and conditions that no one ever bothers to read. And that phase is now over.

Yet predictions for our future keep rolling in, each one confident, and each one contradicting the last. Goldman Sachs estimates AI could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs. The World Economic Forum projects 92 million jobs displaced by 2030, offset by 170 million new ones created, which is a net gain, on paper at least. Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, warns AI could replace half of all entry-level office jobs within five years. Jensen Huang says greater productivity creates more hiring, not less. In 2025 alone, Amazon eliminated 14,000 corporate roles, Microsoft cut 15,000, and Salesforce reduced its customer support workforce by 4,000. Like the billboards in Time Square, both are right, yet neither agree. What the experts ultimately share is uncertainty.

And the AI models are hungry again. This time, media organizations are making sure they require payment from AI giants for their content. New York Times is partnering with Amazon’s AI, Meta with News Corp, and Google with Reddit. But human-made internet content is finite and cannot keep up with the voracious appetite of AI models that do not need time to sleep or metabolise. So the machines have no choice but to prompt themselves, and generate new content upon previous content, with less and less human origin, leading us down a spiral of infinite iteration with less human touch, less human spirit, and less human soul. The only thing the “experts” seem to agree on is that the business potentials are both exhilarating and terrifying.

Meanwhile, Artisan’s billboard promises relief from the burden of human employees. Lower payroll. No sick days. No long hot showers a person needs to feel like a person again. The face on that billboard doesn’t need to ground herself. She doesn’t need anything. What is being sold is not intelligence, but the absence of need. It is a cold world to advertise, and the advertisers seem not to fear the cold.

Two billboards in New York City, and the same ones are popping up in other major cities across the nation. Between them is the argument that is yet to be resolved: whether what is being built is a tool or a replacement, a future or an ending. The experts cannot agree. The lawyers are still filing. The models are still hungry. And somewhere in Times Square, a sad stick figure is still holding his sign, hoping someone walking past will stop long enough to read it.

Authored by Kim Jarrett via The Center Square,

A federal judge dismissed Tennessee charges against a man who, at one time, was at the center of the immigration debate.

Abrego Garcia, who illegally entered the U.S. from El Salvador in 2011, faced federal charges of human smuggling and conspiracy to commit human smuggling.

The charges stemmed from a traffic stop by Tennessee Highway Patrol in December 2022, where Abrego Garcia was found transporting eight passengers across the country.

One of the police officers believed that he was smuggling them, remarking that he was “hauling these people for money,” according to a video obtained by The Center Square through an open records request.

He allegedly did not have a valid driver’s license and was suspected of trafficking the passengers, though he was let go at the FBI’s request.

The car belonged to an illegal immigrant named Jose Ramon Hernandez-Reyes, who was sent to prison in 2020 for human smuggling.

Obama-appointed U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw called the charges “vindictive” because Abrego Garcia challenged his deportation to El Salvador. 

“The objective evidence here shows that, absent Abrego’s successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the Government would not have brought this prosecution,” Crenshaw wrote in his order.

“The Executive Branch closed its investigation on the November 2022 traffic stop. Only after Abrego succeeded in vindicating his rights did the Executive Branch reopen that investigation.”

The Trump administration deported Abrego Garcia to El Salvador in March 2025, according to previous reporting from The Center Square.

Prior to that, Abrego Garcia was living in Maryland and had been arrested on suspicion of involvement in MS-13 in 2019, after immigrating illegally to the United States as a teenager with his parents around 2011.

Officials prepared to deport Abrego Garcia then, but an immigration judge granted him “withholding of removal,” believing his life would be in danger if he were returned to El Salvador. 

The Department of Justice did not immediately return a message from The Center Square about the case. 

Federal officials have issued “Requests for Information” via Treasury Department subpoenas to Turkish-American millionaire and far-left Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and pro-China CodePink cofounder Susan Medea Benjamin as part of a broader probe into whether the activists violated sanctions laws during a “humanitarian” trip to communist-run Cuba, according to a new Fox News report.

Fox’s Asra Q. Nomani, who leads an investigation into dark-money funded NGOs, said the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control is examining whether the activists financed, coordinated, or delivered goods to Cuba in ways that crossed legal boundaries under U.S. sanctions.

🚨 The Treasury Department has subpoenaed Hasan Piker and Medea Benjamin as part of a probe into possible Cuba sanctions violations.

Between Hasan’s “wads of cash” and Medea describing thousands of pounds of goods sent to Cuba, it is not hard to see why Treasury has questions. pic.twitter.com/WRhC5PMDmw

— Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) May 24, 2026

Investigators are also examining whether the two met with Cuban government-linked personnel or entities.

Expanding on Nomani’s report, a likely line of inquiry is whether Piker, Benjamin, or members of the broader delegation met with Cuban officials or personnel linked to the Dirección General de Inteligencia, Cuba’s intelligence service, or the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples, a regime-aligned organization long used to develop foreign activist networks for overseas statecraft operations.

Nomani’s sources said the trip was part of the “Nuestra América Convoy,” or “Our America Convoy,” involving a global network of communist sympathizers, activists, and influencers who brought supplies to the island.

Well well well…

Marxist Hasan Piker and CodePink Cofounder Susan Medea were subpoenaed about a trip to Cuba.

“Nuestra América Convoy”

Investigated to see if the trip violated US law.

Guess who else was part of the trip?

Isra Hirsi

The Marxist daughter of Ilhan Omar.

Oops! pic.twitter.com/wb3IeHuqu5

— C3 (@C_3C_3) May 24, 2026

Nomani noted, “The investigation is part of a broader effort by officials at Treasury, State and Justice departments to curb malign foreign influence operations inside the United States, particularly activities tied to support for political violence, extremist movements or acts the U.S. government classifies as terrorism.”

“The scrutiny reflects growing concern among federal authorities and lawmakers over whether foreign actors and aligned organizations are attempting to shape American political discourse, mobilize activists, sow discord and normalize rhetoric that could encourage violence or undermine U.S. national security interests,” she continued.

U.S. law imposes broad restrictions on financial transactions involving Cuba, primarily through the Cuban Assets Control Regulations, which are administered by the Treasury Department’s OFAC.

The rules generally prohibit unlicensed travel-related transactions and the export of goods or services to Cuba, with limited exceptions for journalism, humanitarian projects, educational programs, and activities intended to support the Cuban people.

One question is whether the March delegation operated within those carveouts, or whether its financing, logistics, coordination, or delivery of supplies crossed into prohibited support for Cuban government-linked entities.

Why Piker, Benjamin, and far-left members of the delegation felt compelled to champion the failed communist country is addressed in a note we penned in late 2025 titled:

• Is There A “Cuba Connection” Behind The Radicalization Of America’s Nonprofit Left

If you really want to understand why the radical left appears to hate America and seeks to implode the nation from within, it is not difficult to see that these ideas are rarely developed organically. More often, they are shaped and reinforced by outside influences. This chart helps explain why the radical left has become so extreme.

As per The Washington Times, “Cuba’s intelligence apparatus is training foreign nationals to wage war against the West.”

Why?

The Trump team appears to be shifting from an observation mode to an action phase in its campaign against radical-left nonprofit networks, some of which are supported by foreign adversaries and left-wing billionaires.

The target is increasingly clear: NGOs, activist groups, and influencer networks that push anti-American propaganda, inflammatory political rhetoric, revolutionary agitation, and Marxist ideology while masquerading as anti-war advocates or civil-rights organizers.

If Treasury OFAC subpoenas are any leading indicator, the Trump team may be entering the action phase. That should put the nonprofit world on notice.

Update(1345ET): Both sides are continuing to be mostly tight-lipped in terms of offering confirmation of what precisely is in the deal, with President Trump having earlier said he’s in no hurry. But this weekend contains some of the most positive momentum towards an actual peace deal and extended ceasefire to date. Per some of the latest from NYT:

Iran’s leaders or official state media have not publicly commented on what is in any potential agreement or what is being discussed. Over the last 24 hours, Iranian and U.S. officials have offered some conflicting depictions of what a deal might contain. On Sunday, the U.S. official said a deal had not yet been signed and was still subject to final approval from President Trump and Iran’s supreme leader, which could take days.

The senior U.S. official said the mechanism by which Iran would dispose of its highly enriched uranium was still being negotiated. Mr. Trump has insisted that the United States seize the material as part of his vow to curb Iran’s nuclear program.

Mr. Trump said in a social media post earlier on Sunday that he had ordered his negotiators “not to rush into a deal,” after saying a day earlier that a preliminary agreement between the two countries was “largely negotiated.”

But Trump is catching some political heat both at home and in Israel, for potentially agreeing to a deal which cedes too much ground to Tehran – or at least that’s the growing criticism of the hawks. He issued the below Truth Social on Sunday, seeking to bat down this criticism, and once again asserting his deal will the the EXACT OPPOSITE of Obama’s JCPOA. But time will soon tell…

Trump also shared this statement from Fox’s correspondent. Tehran has remained insistent that it will never transport its enriched uranium outside it borders:

Not quite yet at the goal line, per Reuters:

Iranian media: There is still a possibility of canceling the agreement due to Washington’s obstruction of some clauses

— First Squawk (@FirstSquawk) May 24, 2026

*  *  *

Top U.S. and Iranian officials signaled they are inching closer to an initial peace deal to wind down the U.S.-Iran conflict and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, though major details remain murky, especially around the future of Iran’s nuclear program.

President Trump said the peace deal has been “largely negotiated” and will be announced “shortly,” with the reopening of the Hormuz chokepoint among its key components.

🚨 “An Agreement has been largely negotiated, subject to finalization between the United States of America, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the various other Countries, as listed…” – President Donald J. Trump pic.twitter.com/Z49bOkkUoh

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 23, 2026

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said earlier that “significant progress” has been made, but no final deal has been reached.

Rubio added that the world could learn “over the next few hours” about progress on resolving the shipping disruption at the Hormuz chokepoint.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio cited ‘significant’ progress in the past 48 hours toward a deal with Iran that could help resolve the situation around the Strait of Hormuz https://t.co/AgaPjulhKo pic.twitter.com/QwFObVmuhv

— Reuters (@Reuters) May 24, 2026

The proposed deal aims to reopen Hormuz, end or pause fighting across multiple fronts, and restart tanker flows through the strait, as the world is dangerously close to an energy cliff. If disrupted for another month, this could spark even more severe economic trouble for the global economy.

Iranian officials said the deal would also lift the U.S. naval blockade, halt fighting involving Israel and Hezbollah, reopen Hormuz without tolls, and release $25 billion in frozen Iranian assets.

The biggest unresolved issue is Iran’s nuclear program. U.S. officials said the framework includes a commitment by Tehran to give up enriched uranium, though the mechanism for that commitment would be negotiated later.

However, Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency dismissed Trump’s claim of an imminent deal as “far from reality.”

Fars reported that, under the latest text exchanged, management of Hormuz would “remain exclusively under the authority and discretion of the Islamic Republic of Iran” if a deal is reached.

Earlier, Fars reported that Iran’s nuclear program, blocked funds, and the status of Hormuz remained “serious points of disagreement” in talks with the U.S.

Iran had indicated that a final draft of the deal was under review.

Iranian state television cited Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei as saying, “Over the past week, the process has been moving toward a convergence of views.”

Latest Headline Round-Up

Peace Deal Progress

• Trump said Saturday that a peace deal with Iran has been ‘largely negotiated’ and he plans to announce an agreement shortly that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday there may be ‘some good news’ regarding the blocked Strait of Hormuz in the coming hours

• Pakistan’s military cited ‘encouraging progress towards a final understanding’ after intensive negotiations over the last 24 hours

• Iran and the US are still at odds over ‘one or two provisions’ of a potential peace agreement, according to Tasnim news agency

Peace Deal Terms

• The agreement involves a 60-day ceasefire extension during which the Strait of Hormuz would be reopened, and Iran would be able to freely sell oil, according to a U.S. official

• A draft agreement stipulates that the US and its allies commit not to attack Iran or its allies under any circumstances, with Iran making a similar commitment, according to Fars news agency

• Iran’s nuclear program, blocked funds and the status of the Strait of Hormuz are ‘serious points of disagreement’ in talks, according to Fars News

Regional Involvement

• Several Arab nations joined Pakistan in trying to push for a resolution to the Iran war as they urged Trump to allow more time for negotiations

• Pakistan’s Prime Minister congratulated Trump on his ‘extraordinary efforts to pursue peace’ after a phone call involving leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Egypt, the UAE, Jordan and Pakistan

• President Trump’s Iran deal will ensure the US military stays in the region for at least the next 30 days, per Fox News.

Macro Impact

• US forces have redirected 100 commercial vessels during its six-week-long blockade of Iran’s ports, according to Central Command

• A liquefied natural gas tanker carrying a shipment for India has exited the Strait of Hormuz for the first time since the Iran war began months ago

• The European Central Bank is heading for an interest-rate increase next month unless a sustainable peace deal between the US and Iran can be found, according to the ECB’s Martin Kocher

Polymarket

Odds of Hormuz traffic returning to normal by the end of June stand at 61%.

The US-Iran permanent peace deal, as of May 26, stands at 35%.

WTI and Brent crude oil prices crashed on Hyperliquid (via Augur Infinity):

S&P500 soars on Hyperliquid (via Augur Infinity):

Bitcoin’s chart continues to trend higher, with price action on an “up and to the right” trajectory.

Must Reads:

• If Iran Imposes A Permanent Toll On Hormuz, Who Will Start Charging Next: Deep Dive Inside The World’s Oil Chokepoints

• Hormuz Shock Raises Recession Risk As Retailers Sound Alarm On Consumer Stress

Why the US needed an urgent peace deal, as explained by UBS:

• UBS Warns Of “Scary” Oil Price Scenarios Once Inventory Buffers Run Dry

Friday’s US-Iran Wrap

• Iran Says ‘No Deal’ Will Materialize If US Insists On Enriched Uranium Handover

Saturday’s US-Iran Wrap

• Israel Unleashes New Gaza Strikes Soon After Trump Says Iran Peace Deal ‘Largely Negotiated,’ Hormuz To Reopen As Final Terms Discussed

Professional subscribers can review the latest institutional reads on Iran, the Hormuz Strait, energy markets, and more on our new Marketdesk.ai portal.