Closed Borders Killing Western Union, Earnings Call Transcripts Reveal
Western Union CFO Matt Cagwin quietly acknowledged in yesterday’s earnings call that fewer border crossings under the Trump admin are chipping away at the remittance behemoth’s profits:
“New migration is the lifeline of our retail business. With borders closed, it is difficult to offset natural attrition… as consumers return home to their native countries,” Cagwin said.
WU has long been the dominant vampire skimming absurd fees off international remittances while providing no technological convenience that Venmo hasn’t already surpassed. It’s instead maintained its now-dwindling market share through lobbying, which is why it can charge a 40% for a South Africa-to-Botswana cash transfer:
The firm’s decline is continuing a trend since President Trump took office for his second term, during which he’s been markedly more hawkish on immigration, with the United States seeing net negative migration last year for the first time in over half a century.
For 2025, it was reported that remittances from the U.S. to Mexico declined almost 5% for the year. Last year’s trend appears to be accelerating.
On yesterday’s earnings call, Western Union CEO Devin McGranahan said that remittances from “U.S. to Mexico declined a little over 3% on a transaction basis in the quarter [Q2, 2026].”
WU’s stock was down 15% on the day, following the news. CEO McGranahan also acknowledged that immigration policy was the core driver behind the revenue loss:
“As you know, remittances in the Americas have faced meaningful pressure that began in late 2024, driven by the changes in immigration policy… It just means it will be difficult to get the business back to true growth without a meaningful change in immigration policy…”
Täteropferumkehr is the German term for “victim blaming” – often hyphenated as Täter-Opfer-Umkehr to make it look slightly less clunky. In recent times, our political and media establishment have turned it into a sharp tool, employed with reference to both foreign and domestic politics.
Unsurprisingly, Germany’s woke Left – always eager to champion the alleged plight of the “oppressed” – views Israel, the only functioning democracy in the Middle East, as the ultimate perpetrator, while framing bloodthirsty Arab aggressors as the true victims. In 2025, five Berlin-based “activists” (four of whom openly identify as “they/them”) ransacked an Elbit Systems facility in Ulm, causing over a million euros in damage. Now standing trial in Stuttgart, they naturally view themselves as the victims.
One wonders what would happen if “roller-skating” Daniel, “music-making” Crow, “poetry-writing” Leandra, “community-organising” Vi, and “nature-loving” Zo were dropped onto the shores of Gaza. Would “they/them” receive a warm welcome from Hamas? The non-binary inmates might have gleaned an inkling of what radical Islamists have in store for them following the Islamist attack on the Berlin Pride parade last Saturday.
On the domestic front, we see an equally Orwellian exercise in doublethink. The one political party that has been systematically cut off from public funding, denied committee chairs, pilloried behind a political Brandmauer (“firewall”), and whose members suffer the lion’s share of physical assaults is routinely portrayed as the sole perpetrator.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is ceaselessly accused of peddling racism, revisionism and Russophilia – to name just a few of the slurs slung its way by the goody-two-shoes gatekeepers of the moral high ground.
The siren song of establishment polity, legacy media and state-funded NGOs has increasingly been amplified in secondary schools.
In North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, one in five schools belongs to the taxpayer-funded “School Without Racism” network, backed by a leftist teachers’ union. Where these funds actually go is often opaque, but the encouraged “activism” almost always targets “Right-wing extremism” – which, in modern German parlance, simply means campaigning against the AfD.
Currently, state and federal authorities are in a panic over the prospect of the AfD winning an outright majority in upcoming state elections. Polls show support for the maligned party hovering above 40% in Saxony-Anhalt, which could easily translate into a parliamentary majority. Reiner Haseloff, a former Minister-President of the state, even resorted to scaremongering, hinting that secondary school diplomas from Saxony-Anhalt might no longer be recognised in other parts of Germany if the “wrong” party wins.
Often, the anti-AfD machinery operates more subtly. Before the last local elections, municipal authorities displayed posters and information for all mayoral candidates in my school’s foyer – well, almost all. The AfD candidate was conspicuously missing. When I asked the election official about this glaring omission, I was told the local AfD had failed to respond to the municipality’s request for information. When a colleague followed up with the local AfD branch, they confirmed they had never been contacted in the first place.
But the most ludicrous example of state-sponsored indoctrination in my area is an AI robot named “Navel”.
Developed by a PhD student at the local university in cahoots with the largely taxpayer-funded “Active Museum South-Westphalia”, the robot was programmed to impersonate a “racist uncle” at a family reunion, spouting anti-immigrant talking points.
Secondary school students were encouraged to “spar” with the divisive Dalek to hone their skills in rebutting Right-wing thought. To make the exercise even more absurd, the robot is built to look like a toddler and wears a woolly cap to “humanise” it.
Yet, despite the vast sums of money, resources and personnel poured into this apparatus by governments and their ‘civil society’ allies, the desired outcome remains elusive.
Marcel Fratzscher, a favourite economist of the establishment Left, recently lamented in Die Zeit that young men in particular are turning to the populist right because they “feel like losers of modernisation”.
His grim conclusion: “There is little remedy.”
So what does it mean when the concerted effort of the righteous left cannot turn the tide of sustained AfD support? Perhaps the commentariat, the wokerati and the creator of the unwittingly ironically named AI uncle “Navel” should engage less in navel-gazing and doublethink and more in recognising reality. Israel – not Hamas – is our ally; the AfD is a party like all others, entitled to the same privileges; and children in school must not be indoctrinated.
Perhaps we should send “Navel” to the “they/them” lot in jail for some instructive lessons. But they might refuse to engage with him so long as he declines to share his pronouns.
Crude Inventories Have Fallen To “Precariously Low” Levels
U.S. crude inventories fell sharply last week as refineries ramped up production to capitalize on higher fuel prices following renewed conflict with Iran, according to Financial Times.
Commercial crude stockpiles declined by 7.2 million barrels, while the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) dropped another 3.8 million barrels. Refineries operated at 97% of capacity nationwide, with some Midwest facilities running at full capacity as exports to Asia and Europe increased.
FT writes that the drawdown comes as renewed fighting between the U.S. and Iran continues to disrupt oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, forcing the U.S. to help offset reduced Middle Eastern supplies. Analysts warn that America is increasingly carrying the burden of stabilizing global oil markets.
“US crude inventories, both commercial and the SPR, have drawn down by nearly 20 per cent since early April. The US accounts for about 70 per cent of global onshore crude inventory draws over the past four months,” said Matt Smith of Kpler.
“It has carried the burden of trying to keep oil prices in check over this period via SPR releases and higher exports, but stockpiles are rapidly depleting and this pace of draws cannot persist ad infinitum.”
The SPR has now fallen to 307.7 million barrels, its lowest level in more than 40 years. While still above its estimated operational minimum of 180 million to 200 million barrels, analysts warn that continued depletion leaves the U.S. increasingly exposed to future supply shocks.
Commodity Context founder Rory Johnston described current crude and gasoline inventories as “precariously low.”
Ten years ago, Britons voted to leave the European Union, launching three and a half years of tumultuous negotiations and domestic political ructions, only subsiding after the UK’s official withdrawal in January 2020.
It’s tempting to see Brexit as a watershed moment in Britain’s political economy. Britons themselves now tend to regret the choice rather than affirm it, with narrow majorities affirming that Brexit has been “more of a failure” and supporting restoring free movement with the EU in exchange for single-market access.
Contrary to some forecasts, Brexit has been closer to an economic blip than a disaster. Figure 1 shows net disposable household income per capita in the UK and comparable countries. While Ireland has rocketed ahead of this whole group, it’s difficult to see any worse economic performance in the UK compared to France and Germany since 2020.
Figure 1: Disposable Income Over Time in the UK and Comparable Countries.
But this low bar—no worse than France or Germany—reflects the deeper ailment in British politics. Brexit was merely one episode in a long series of abdications of responsibility by British leaders.
Free-market Brexiteers like Daniel Hannan assured us that Brexit would allow the UK to deregulate and improve competitiveness:
“It’s 24 June 2025 …. The years that followed the 2016 referendum didn’t just reinvigorate our economy, our democracy and our liberty. They improved relations with our neighbours,” he forecast on June 21, 2016. He went on:
“The United Kingdom is now the region’s foremost knowledge-based economy. We lead the world in biotech, law, education, the audio-visual sector, financial services and software. New industries, from 3D printing to driverless cars, have sprung up around the country. Older industries, too, have revived as energy prices have fallen back to global levels: steel, cement, paper, plastics and ceramics producers have become competitive again.”
None of that happened. The UK never undertook deregulation commensurate with the new barriers that Brexit imposed, such as new customs paperwork and inspections for goods traveling between the UK and the Continent, and strict limits on Britons and Europeans moving to each other’s countries for work. According to a research briefing from the House of Commons Library, “most regulations made under the [UK law authorizing repeal of EU regulations] have not led to substantive policy changes.”
So much for Brexit’s oversold transformative potential. The real story Britons must grapple with is a nearly 20-year narrative of decline.
Britain had once outperformed its closest Continental peers on the back of a market-friendly economic model created by Thatcher, preserved by Major, and adapted by Blair. Since the disastrous premiership of Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Britain has sickened itself with the same maladies that have since left most of Western Europe stagnating.
Brown’s premiership, spanning 2007 to 2010, saw the government debt-to-GDP ratio increase 76 percent in just three years. All of that increase came from government spending, not tax cuts (taxes were raised at the high end and on some middle-income households). While the Great Recession caused government spending and debt to rise everywhere, Britain’s increase was much larger than that of France and Germany (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Government Debt to GDP Ratios in the UK, France, and Germany.
Another long-term legacy of Brown’s premiership has been the Equality Act, which introduced the language of “rights” to economic contracts. It mandates detailed fair employment protections across a broad range of protected categories, including a Marxist-inspired concept of equal pay for equal “demands” or “effort.” It is the legal basis under which some courts are now ruling that it is unlawful to pay men and women different wages in a single company even if they do different jobs.
The Conservatives took power, in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, from Brown’s Labour, but to soothe voters worried about a return of Thatcherism, successive Tory Prime Ministers maintained the high-tax, high-spending, high-regulation equilibrium.
Brown’s tax hikes had increased tax revenues to GDP from 32 to 33 percent. Despite a small top marginal rate cut, Conservative-led governments raised VAT and eventually, under Rishi Sunak, reversed cuts to corporate income taxes. By 2022, tax revenues to GDP stood at 35 percent.
One of the UK’s main economic policy advantages over the Continent has been a flexible labor market, but that is now under threat. The Blair government introduced a largely symbolic minimum wage, but the Tories hiked it to new heights, from £5.52 in 2007 to £11.44 in 2024 when Labour won back power, with inflation-adjusted rates rising inexorably since 2015. The UK minimum wage is now two-thirds of the median wage; that ratio is one of the highest in the OECD.
An example of Britons’ growing obsession with getting free stuff from the government is the explosion of the Motability scheme, which is supposed to give mobility-impaired disabled people the right to allocate some of their disability benefits toward leasing new cars. Eligibility for and participation in the program have exploded, to the point that a fifth of all new cars in the UK—and reportedly a full half of those in Northern Ireland—are leased through Motability. Motability itself is an ostensibly private nonprofit, but its monopoly on managing this welfare scheme has enriched it to the point of dispensing multimillion-pound bonuses to its executives.
The overall disability caseload in the UK has grown by 57 percent since 2005, rising from 7.4 percent of the population in May 2005 to 10.8 percent in May 2025. Most of that growth has been in just the last five years.
Benefits for pensioners have also exploded. In coalition with the Lib Dems, the Tories enacted the “triple lock,” growing social security benefits at the highest of earnings growth, CPI inflation, or 2 percent.
But it is seen as not nice in mainstream British discourse to question the expansion of welfare and especially cornerstones of politically correct regulation like the Equality Act.
British governments have failed to level with the British people. The punchbowl is gone. The money is simply not there. The debt vigilantes are at the door, with the British benchmark 10-year rate among the highest in the developed world (Figure 3).
Figure 3: 10-Year Bond Yields, Selected Countries, June 22, 2026.
Is the United States faring any better? Not much. At least the U.S. has had some real deregulation, but the fantasy of debt-fueled free lunches still reigns supreme in the minds of politicians and many voters.
Still, Britain stands out as a country where politicians have waved away tradeoffs and legislated feel-good rules that grab a few days of good press at the expense of long-term economic pain. Brexit was fantasy politics, to be sure, but that is something it shares with the politically correct Regime of Nice that has ruled the country for the past 20 years.
Xi Tells PLA TO Build ‘Intelligent Military System’ As Beijing Leans Into Drones And AI
China’s Xi Jinping told the People’s Liberation Army this week to intensify the military application of artificial intelligence and unmanned systems, telling a Politburo study session that the force should build toward what the official readout called an “intelligent military system.” The directive landed days before the PLA’s ninety-ninth anniversary and squarely on the modernization targets Beijing has set for its centenary in 2027.
According to the state news agency Xinhua, as noted by Bloomberg, Xi told the session that the PLA should strengthen the military application of unmanned intelligent technologies, deepen the development of networked information systems, and gradually build an intelligent military. The report singles out autonomous and AI-enabled capability as the direction of travel and ties it to the “intelligentization” doctrine that has guided PLA planning for years. Xi paired the technology push with a renewed anti-corruption drive inside the military and the familiar insistence that the armed forces answer, always, to the Party.
The Race With Washington
Obviously this is about geopolitical dominance. Beijing’s public posture increasingly treats AI and unmanned platforms as the technologies that will reshape modern warfare, and Xi’s remarks land while the United States pours its own money into military AI and autonomous systems. Analysts who track the PLA describe intelligentization as a whole-of-nation effort, mobilizing not just the armed forces but the country’s scientific and industrial base, with the most ambitious version of the goal being to match or exceed US military capabilities by mid-century.
Meanwhile, reviews of Chinese research surfaced PLA-linked work using Western AI models, obtained through distillation, to train domestic defense tools, a reminder that the “intelligent military” Xi is describing is being assembled in part from the same frontier-model capabilities the West is trying to fence off through export controls.
It’s no secret that unmanned and AI-enabled systems are a key priority for Chinese military modernization, and it it comes as Washington’s own hawks are warning that permitting delays and data-center backlash could hand Beijing the edge in exactly this contest…
I think nothing enrages Americans more than a lack of accountability from government officials. Yes, it happens often, and the public hasn’t taken up torches and pitchforks (yet), but I would point out that these incidents are cumulative and they light a growing fire within the collective memory. Eventually, people are going to snap if they don’t see action taken to rectify past wrongs.
This week, Dr. Anthony Fauci faced a flurry of questions from the Senate Homeland Security Committee over his handling of the covid response as well as his involvement in the gain of function research which likely led to the creation of the viral variant that spread around the world and nearly triggered a permanent Orwellian police state.
Fauci pleaded the Fifth over 100 times. It’s not a sign of confidence in his own innocence.
He knows he’s untouchable legally, but I think what the man fears most is public judgment, and he’s not going to offer any confirmation that conservatives and the alternative media were right about him all along. Unfortunately, even with substantial evidence, there is very little that any congressional committee or even the Trump Administration can do about him.
Fauci is well protected, and not just by the sweeping pardon “signed” by Joe Biden which covers the Doctor back to 2014. No, Fauci is also protected by the system – The bureaucracy and the globalist network of which he is a member. Fauci is a chaos agent and he served his purpose well. They’re not going to let him face punishment. If they did, then they might find it harder to procure the cooperation and loyalty of other bureaucrats in future schemes.
There are a lot of commentators out there right now who are agitated by the idea that Fauci might escape penalties for his crimes, but I have to ask, what did they expect? Did they think that Biden’s pardon would simply be ignored?
It’s fascinating to me that so many folks in the alternative media and conservative movements tend to attack Trump every time he takes any action that might remotely bend constitutional rules. They warn with suspicion that he’s “becoming a dictator.” Then, those same people will froth cynically and blackpill when Trump doesn’t act like a dictator when it comes to their pet issues.
It’s rather hypocritical. It would be smarter to admit that Trump’s powers are limited, largely by the same bureaucracy that’s protecting Anthony Fauci. It’s the bureaucracy which constantly interferes with migrant deportations. The same bureaucracy that’s preventing the SAVE Act from being passed. The same system that censored us for years because we dared to share the truth.
Fauci is a prime example of the perversions of that system and why it needs to be cleansed, but he’s also just a symptom of a greater disease. Making an example out of him would be a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t solve the greater problem. People need to stop waiting around for Trump to unilaterally “take down the deep state.” He’s not in a position to do so.
For those who might have forgotten what really happened, at the start of 2020 the world was on the verge of a massive globalist coup, facilitated by hysteria surrounding the pandemic. By early 2020 I had written several articles covering the potential for a pandemic event being used by the establishment as a rationale for wider lockdowns of the population.
At this time, it was not clear if the coronavirus in Wuhan, China involved a microbe that was truly deadly, or if the threat was overblown. It didn’t really matter, the end game was the same. The goal, in my view, was to create enough fear and chaos to trigger an economic crisis and expedite a medical dictatorship. Once Joe Biden entered the White House, they nearly succeeded.
“First, the notion that it [covid] was caused by Chinese citizens ‘eating bats’ or being exposed to a live animal market is rather ridiculous. We’ve seen NO hard evidence whatsoever that this is true, and I believe the narrative is a cover for the fact that the city of Wuhan where the virus outbreak began is the home of not one but TWO level 4 biohazard labs.
I have a hard time ignoring the strange ‘coincidence’ of the high level biohazard labs in Wuhan in favor of the idea that the virus was launched by chance due to the odd diets of central Chinese people. Given the evidence it appears that the coronavirus was gestated in a lab, not in someone’s bat and snake soup. In 2017, scientists outside of China warned that these labs were not secure and that a virus might escape one of the facilities.”
I argued that the outbreak might be a controlled incident or a false flag. I noted the strange coincidence of “Event 201” disaster simulation held by the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum only a couple months before the covid pandemic officially began. The simulation involved the international outbreak of a deadly coronavirus.
A few other media outlets came to the same conclusions I did in those early days, including Zero Hedge and the Washington Times. Zero Hedge was ultimately banned from social media (including Twitter), for the position. The Washington Times was pressured to backtrack on portions of their investigation. My website was essentially shadow-banned from search engines like Google.
The media attacked us relentlessly as a “threat to national safety”. They called the idea of a lab leak “baseless conspiracy theory” while citing Dr. Fauci as one of “the most trusted officials in America” when it came to pandemic information (apparently, he was absolutely giddy over his deification by mainstream news platforms).
Six years later we have all been vindicated in our analysis of the pandemic and the abuse of power that it enabled. This week, we have been treated to the release of 1141 pages of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s professional “diaries”, which cover a period from December of 2019 to December of 2022. These diaries confirm everything we suspected at the beginning of the event.
Fauci was deeply embedded in the government’s policy apparatus; he was the go-to adviser for the White House and a primary media representative. He had direct influence over government decisions to enact lockdowns, mandates and vaccine campaigns. He was also tied to the lab experimentation that (allegedly) led to the creation of the virus in question. In other words, Fauci acted as a primary gatekeeper for the chaos, from inception to solution. From end to end.
I continue to believe (according to the behavior and white papers of globalist organizations) that covid was intended to kill far more people than it ended up killing. The initial estimations by groups like the World Health Organization put the death rate at around 3% and a number of news outlets repeated this data point. I think this was the death rate they expected, but not the death rate they eventually got.
The real Infection Fatality Rate ended up being closer to 0.23% on average. Meaning, the world was shut down over a virus that 99.8% of people would easily survive. This fact was greatly suppressed by the media, by politicians and by bureaucrats like Fauci. As far as I can tell, Fauci never addressed this data publicly; it was too inconvenient to the fear narrative.
Any mention of the virus being engineered was eventually silenced. Fauci knew of this censorship and often encouraged it in the name of “fighting misinformation”. According to his diaries, he steered the science away from the lab leak theory even though a majority of virologists broached the idea as likely. Fauci helped organize and participated in discussions that led to the influential “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” paper (published in Nature Medicine in March 2020). That paper concluded that a laboratory-based scenario was not plausible and strongly favored natural spillover.
After considerable push-back, Fauci would later claim that he was open to wider investigations into covid origins. But, at the height of the pandemic fervor it was Fauci who consistently labeled these avenues of research as “conspiracy theory”. It was Fauci who poisoned the well. But why was he so obsessed with eliminating the lab leak theory from discussion?
The NIH funded an EcoHealth Alliance grant, providing an award of roughly $600,000 to the Wuhan lab for bat coronavirus research. Some of that work involved creating chimeric viruses and testing them in humanized mice or human cells. A GOA review of federal funding to Chinese agencies from 2014-2021 found at least $1.4 million had been transferred to the Wuhan Lab during that time.
In 2024 congressional testimony, Acting NIH Director Lawrence Tabak acknowledged that the NIH funded this research at Wuhan through EcoHealth. He also admitted that the research met a “generic” definition of gain-of-function. This was a complete contradiction of Fauci’s ongoing denials.
The experiments to enhance viruses for human spread were pursued under a little-known loophole in the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). As long as the research was meant to develop “solutions or treatments” for the potential spread of manipulated viruses, gain of function experimentation was technically legal. Fauci’s behavior suggests he was covering his tracks on gain of function and the chance that the NIH program was ground zero.
Currently, US national intelligence agencies, the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Energy and multiple foreign intel agencies say they believe the Wuhan lab leak theory is probable (i.e. NOT conspiracy theory).
Fauci might have set the powder keg in place. He might have even lit the fuse. However, the ultimate institutional surge to exploit the crisis required a level of organization much bigger than Fauci. I would look to the Gates Foundation, the WEF, the WHO, as well as influential figures at the Imperial College London, etc. for the top of the pyramid when it comes to the medical tyranny side of things.
In the meantime, the good doctor deserves a lifetime in prison (or execution) for his participation in the coup. Will he get it? Not at the hands of any government, I suspect. Like I said, the bureaucracy is the government BEHIND the government. It is a faceless leviathan that defies transparency. It’s the fail-safe in the event that political leadership grows a conscience. The public can vote out politicians, but we can’t vote out the bureaucracy.
If Trump or the Senate or anyone else attempts to prosecute Fauci, the legal infrastructure overrun by activist judges will protect him. This is a fact. This is how the elites maintain a certain level of control and prevent any real reformation or reckoning.
There are plenty of political leaders in the US that fought back against the mandates (nearly half of all states blocked the restrictions). They helped us win the battle and it’s important to give credit where credit is due. That said, these people can only do so much. They are bound by the rules of the system and the system is designed to safeguard the corrupt.
Wichita Man Sues City To Rip Out Its 200-Camera Flock Dragnet
A Wichita machinist, Mason Grimmett, sued his own city this week, arguing that the roughly 200 Flock license-plate readers the police department has bolted around town amount to warrantless dragnet surveillance forbidden by the Kansas Constitution. The complaint, filed in Sedgwick County District Court by the Kansas Justice Institute, does not ask for money – rather, it asks a judge to declare the program unconstitutional and shut it down.
The cameras are made by Flock Safety, one of the largest plate-reader vendors in the country, and Wichita started installing them in 2020. The institute now describes the city as saturated with them – close to 200 AI-powered cameras photographing every passing vehicle and logging its make, model, color, plate, and identifying marks into a searchable database. Grimmett, a lifelong Wichita resident who testified against the program at a public meeting in June, argues that the system violates Section 15 of the state constitution, which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, and that the city is, in the complaint’s language, tracking and databasing law-abiding Kansans “without a warrant, without probable cause, without reasonable suspicion” and without any judicial oversight at all.
The Cops Who Already Abused It
Grimmett points to several local cases in which Kansas police used Flock cameras to stalk people, including abuse by former Kechi Police Lt. Victor Heiar, who was sentenced to eighteen months of probation for using Flock cameras to track a woman. According to local reports, a former detective was also accused of using plate-reader technology to stalk his wife, and a Sedgwick-area police chief reportedly ran an ex-girlfriend through the cameras 164 times. The institute is not disputing that the cameras help solve crimes. Its point is that they photograph everyone, all the time, and that the same access which cracks a burglary case also lets a jealous cop follow whoever he pleases.
“This is America, and we don’t tolerate warrantless surveillance,” said Sam MacRoberts, the institute’s litigation director, who says that if the government wants to monitor a citizen it ought to go to a judge and explain why. Grimmett says he cannot drive to work, the gym, a doctor’s appointment, a polling place, or a meeting of the local Sunflower Privacy Alliance without being catalogued by the department and by Flock.
Part Of A Widening Front
Lawsuits over Flock cameras are starting to stack up. In April, three San Jose residents filed a class action over that city’s nearly 500 cameras. In February, a separate class action in San Francisco accused Flock of sharing plate-reader data with ICE, CBP, the FBI, and ATF in violation of California’s ALPR Privacy Act, the sort of out-of-jurisdiction access that keeps surfacing in audits elsewhere and that has already pushed at least one California city to suspend its cameras pending review. The pushback has reached Congress, too, where a cluster of Republican bills – Rep. Thomas Massie’s move to withhold federal funds from any city running the cameras, and Rep. Tim Burchett’s Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act, which names Flock explicitly – now takes aim at the government-contract model the company runs on. Wichita’s department has previously described its own program as self-auditing, and the city had not filed a response to Grimmett’s suit as of Friday.
None of this will surprise regular readers who have watched the license-plate-reader map fill in city by city while the contracts governing who can query the data stayed conveniently vague. Grimmett, meanwhile, is betting that a state constitution’s search-and-seizure clause is the faster route to pulling the cameras down, and a ruling in his favor would hand every other saturated Flock city a template…
A mysterious predator has been tearing into whales, seals, and giant tuna off the New York coast, leaving bite marks the size of dinner plates and sparking theories of a radioactive “Sharkzilla” spawned by decades of government nuclear waste dumping.
Because nothing says summer 2026 like the possibility that Cold War bureaucrats cooked up a genetically enhanced killing machine in the Atlantic.
Montauk is once again ground zero for monster shark drama. A humpback whale turned up with a 24-inch bite wound. A gray seal took a 22-inch chomp. A 400-pound tuna was found shredded.
Monster ‘Sharkzilla’ leaves trail of carnage off New York coast as scientists probe nuclear mutant theory https://t.co/K4Mw7yunqb
Local shark scientist Craig O’Connell, the Montauk-based marine biologist who’s appeared in more than 40 Shark Week programs, launched an investigation in September 2025 and pointed the finger at the Hudson Canyon, a vast underwater gorge about 100 miles offshore that drops from 900 feet to 4,000 feet.
The canyon has a dirty little history. In the late 1960s, the U.S. government dumped 15,000 barrels of nuclear waste into those depths. Ten years later the barrels were found leaking. O’Connell floated the idea that radiation could have triggered genetic mutations in the local predators.
“Radioactive leaks could be impacting wildlife, even top predators,” he said. “If animals are subjected to nuclear waste, this could cause genetic mutations and abnormal growth. If this predator is genetically altered, it could be faster, stronger and deadlier than any predator on Earth. We are calling it Sharkzilla.”
O’Connell and his team had just 30 hours before a storm to lure, tag, and sample the beast. They dropped baited cameras into the twilight zone more than 600 feet down.
A massive great white lunged at the lens. Then makos appeared – fast, solitary hunters capable of more than 40 mph. Two of them showed up together, then vanished, as if something larger had spooked them. An enormous shadow cruised past and disappeared.
The crew deployed a decoy dolphin named Hudson stuffed with tuna and a homemade “blubber blaster” designed to mimic a rupturing whale carcass. As the light faded, a nearly 12-foot female mako charged the boat.
“This is Sharkzilla,” O’Connell shouted.
He swam outside the cage, tagged her on the second attempt, and collected a tissue sample. Tracker signals showed her heading in the same direction as the earlier attacks. Lab tests later found zero evidence of radioactive contamination.
What they actually found was a pregnant mako using the waters as a breeding ground, hunting hard to feed her developing pups. The big females had returned to an area once famous for monster sharks until overfishing wiped them out.
“In the past, this is the place you came to catch monster sharks,” O’Connell said.
He added, “There are so many records right here off the shores of Montauk. All these monster sharks were completely fished out. They’re gone. But all the evidence we are seeing is telling me that all these big sharks might be back. I know those big sharks are out there, and we are going to find them.”
The episode, Sharkzilla Takes New York, airs tonight on Discovery Channel as part of Shark Week 2026. O’Connell later called the encounters “mind-blowing” and noted the mako “exhibited the most threatening posture… All you’d see were teeth.”
He also admitted the nuclear idea was speculative: “Could it have created giant sharks? People will have to watch and find out. But it’s possible.”
So likely no glowing, multi-eyed, radiation-spawned abomination is currently snacking on Long Island’s marine megafauna. Just a very large, very hungry, very pregnant mako doing what apex predators do.
The real story is the government once thought it was fine to sink thousands of barrels of nuclear waste into a canyon that feeds the East Coast food chain, then left the mess to leak. Nature, as usual, is more resilient than the bureaucrats who polluted it.
America’s waters are still full of surprises. Some of them have very big teeth. And some of the biggest problems were dumped there by the same people who now lecture everyone else about the environment.
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Unitree IPO Finally Puts A Real Price On Profitable Humanoid Robots
Chinese robotics maker Unitree formally launched its IPO on Shanghai’s STAR Market on Thursday, opening the books on a deal that aims to raise about 4.2 billion yuan (roughly $618 million) at an implied valuation near 42 billion yuan ($5.9 billion). Once the shares start trading, the listing will put a real, daily market price on a profitable humanoid-robot maker operating at scale – the first the sector has had.
Until now, humanoid robotics companies have been raising capital based on numbers nobody could really challenge since nobody has had to actually clear a market. So far we have Figure AI sitting on a $39 billion private valuation, and a clutch of Chinese rivals each pushing past $3 billion in the primary market. A public listing swaps the euphoria of those private rounds for the discipline of a secondary one. Regulators approved the registration in early July after a review that took roughly 104 days from acceptance, one of the fastest STAR Market clearances on record. Observers have linked the speed directly to Beijing’s push to channel capital toward strategic robotics and AI champions. That said, Unitree has been designated a Chinese military company in the US, and Washington is weighing action against subsidized Chinese robotics imports even as the machines turn up for sale on Amazon.
A Rare Profitable Name in a Sea of Losses
Unitree makes an unusually clean test case because unlike most of its peers, it actually turns a profit. The company reported 2025 revenue of about 1.7 billion yuan and adjusted profit around 591 million yuan – a net margin north of 35 percent that, in a field defined by cash burn, is close to an anomaly. It shipped more than 5,500 humanoid robots last year, more than any other company globally, alongside cumulative quadruped sales above 33,000 units. Overseas revenue has consistently run past 40 percent of the total. Founder and chief executive Wang Xingxing controls roughly a third of the business. The prospectus earmarks the proceeds for robot “brains” and model research, robot bodies, new products, and a manufacturing base.
The rest of the field looks nothing like it. UBTech, which is pursuing its own A-share listing, has put its Walker S humanoid through more than 50,000 hours of training on BYD production lines but keeps running losses. It just launched a consumer-grade bionic robot priced as high as 990,000 yuan (about $146,000) in a bid to crack the home market. Overseas, Tesla’s Optimus is slated to reach mass production this year. Every player in the space has a demo reel and a private valuation nobody has to defend. Unitree is about to have a share price that trades every day and settles the argument in public.
Whatever Unitree prints when it debuts becomes the benchmark for the entire “embodied intelligence” trade.
President Donald Trump on Friday said that he still wants compensation for people he said were victimized by a weaponized federal government while acknowledging that a planned $1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund is “dead” after the Department of Justice walked it back amid congressional opposition and court rulings.
“It is dead,” Trump said at a Cabinet meeting on Friday.
“But I wish it weren’t, to be honest with you. I think people were horribly treated, horribly abused … and I’d like to see them compensated for their pain.
“Their families have been ruined. Many, many suicides—they’ve committed suicide,” he also said in the meeting, which was held at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland.
“People that were very successful, that wanted to go to a rally or an event and ended up spending the rest of their lives in horror.
“And this fund, this fund was not for me,” he said.
“This fund was for those people.”
Earlier this year, the Justice Department announced the fund as part of a settlement agreement in a lawsuit where Trump had sued the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to provide money for individuals who claimed to have been targeted by “weaponization and lawfare” under the previous administration. Trump’s lawsuit with the IRS was over a leak of his tax returns.
The fund, however, was met with legal setbacks as a federal judge blocked it from going into effect. That block was extended in mid-June.
Plaintiffs who sued to block the payouts argue that the government can’t legally divert taxpayer money into what they alleged was a slush fund for compensating Trump’s allies.
Also in June, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress that the government is scrapping its plans for the fund in the face of a bipartisan backlash, and government attorneys have argued that lawsuits challenging the fund are now moot.
During a House hearing on June 2, Blanche said, “We are not moving forward with the fund, period.”
Earlier on Friday, Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that the fund was meant to defend “the great American Patriots who were hunted down like dogs and whose lives were unfairly and illegally destroyed” by the Biden administration.
The president added that regarding the alleged victims, “perhaps there has never been a group of people treated so badly in our Nation’s history.”
“They are suffering still, many ruined, and I felt that they should be given compensation for what has been done to them,” he said, adding that Blanche should also be approved as attorney general by the Republican-controlled Senate.
Friday’s meeting is the first televised Cabinet session ever conducted at Camp David. The Trump administration previously attempted to hold the meeting in May, but it was scrapped due to bad weather.
During his first term in office, Trump held a Cabinet meeting at the presidential retreat that was closed to the press.
