Via American Greatness,

A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s new mail-in voting requirements, setting up another potential Supreme Court fight just days before states are expected to begin sending ballots for the November midterm elections.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued a 14-day temporary restraining order preventing enforcement of a new U.S. Postal Service rule implementing President Donald Trump’s executive order on election procedures.

The ruling comes days after the Supreme Court allowed the administration to move forward in a procedural decision. The justices did not rule on the legality of Trump’s order, instead finding that Talwani had acted before the dispute was ready for judicial review.

Democratic-led states and voting rights groups subsequently refiled their challenges after USPS finalized its rule.

Under the Postal Service requirements, states must provide certain recipient information through a USPS portal and comply with envelope and barcode standards before outbound mail ballots will be accepted.

Talwani said states would face significant logistical problems implementing the requirements with the midterms approaching.

“Plaintiff states have neither time nor funds to design new mail ballots, seek approval of the new designs, order production of mail ballots, update their own election management systems, train election officials to use the USPS portal and upload citizen data to the portal, all before the midterms,” Talwani wrote.

Nearly one-third of Americans vote by mail, making the legal dispute potentially consequential for November’s elections.

Democratic attorneys general argue that Trump and the Postal Service are improperly interfering with authority the Constitution grants primarily to states and Congress over election procedures.

USPS disputes that characterization, saying its rule does not determine voter eligibility or compare submitted information against state voter rolls. States would retain authority over who qualifies to vote by mail.

Trump’s executive order also sought additional proof of citizenship for voter registration, including documents such as a U.S. passport, certain military identification or government-issued photo identification accompanied by citizenship documentation.

The administration has argued that tighter election procedures are necessary to protect election integrity, while opponents contend the president lacks authority to impose the requirements.

Thursday’s order blocks enforcement for two weeks. A hearing is scheduled for Sept. 3, and another appeal is expected.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Britain’s largest local authority has gone to the High Court to stop people hanging the Union Flag and the St George’s Cross from lampposts, with campaigners warning that a breach could mean up to two years behind bars.

Birmingham City Council filed the application this week as the latest move in a year-long war on “unauthorised attachments.” The attachments in question are the flags of the country. The penalties being threatened include prison, unlimited fines, and seized assets.

Protesters who fly the Union Jack from lampposts could criminal proceedings if the injunction is granted.

BREAKING: Protesters who fly the Union Jack from lampposts could face two years in jail after Birmingham Council applied for an injunction. @PeterBleksley: “It’s absolutely scandalous!”@TVKev pic.twitter.com/XExfsblLcR

— Talk (@TalkTV) August 26, 2026

Former Metropolitan Police detective Peter Bleksley called it what it is. “It’s absolutely scandalous!”

The Free Speech Union described the move as “truly mental.”

This is truly mental.

Birmingham City Council has applied for an injunction that could result in people who fly the Union Jack from lampposts being jailed for up to two years.

Threatening people with prison for displaying their national flag is a direct assault on freedom of… https://t.co/5kJdBCU1gv

— The Free Speech Union (@SpeechUnion) August 26, 2026

A year ago the same city was already ripping the colours down and calling it safety. Residents put them back up. The council has now decided a High Court order is the way to finish the job.

On 26 August the council announced it had submitted an injunction application “as part of our ongoing work to prohibit unauthorised attachments on the highway, including flags and banners.”

Green councillor Jane Baston, cabinet member for equalities, communities and social justice, said: “The Council is taking a lawful, proportionate and evidence-led approach to unauthorised attachments on the highway. This includes pursuing injunctive action based on the evidence gathered to date.”

She added: “Our priority is to protect public safety, staff and contractor welfare, community cohesion and the responsible use of public funds. We ask residents and community groups to support this approach and to ensure any displays are placed only where permission exists.”

The authority insists the action “is not directed at any particular community, belief or viewpoint.” It says the installation and reinstallation of flags has had an impact on the public, and that officers have “witnessed incidents that have involved harassment, intimidation or obstruction during removal activity.”

The named targets give the game away. The application lists Raise the Colours co-founder Ryan Bridge, plus others associated with the campaign. Raise the Colours said it had not received or reviewed the papers and could not comment on the application. The group rejected “any suggestion that we are seeking to divide communities,” and describes itself as a “grassroots movement for unity and patriotism.”

The nationwide campaign by the group to put the England flag back on the street is widely reported to have started in Birmingham last summer. The council spent the following year treating that campaign as a highways nuisance. Now it wants a judge to make the nuisance a city-wide prohibition.

Anti-flag campaigners in the city have been lobbying for exactly this. Brummies United Against Racism and Hate Crime applauded the legal bid, spoke of “thuggish behaviour,” and framed the flags as an attempt to “harass and intimidate residents of our proudly multicultural city.”

So the national flag is an attachment. Opposition to it is cohesion. And a bankrupt council that spent more than a year failing to collect the bins has found the money and the energy to take patriotism to the Royal Courts of Justice.

Birmingham is taking a page from the book of Liberal Democrat-run Oxfordshire County Council, who won the first injunction of its kind, barring unidentified people from attaching England or Union flags to highway structures or painting flag imagery on roads.

Council leader Tim Bearder celebrated. “This is a welcome judgement. We’re very pleased with the result,” he said, adding: “This sets a legal precedent and will hopefully deter people in not just Oxfordshire but around the country from partaking in this criminal activity.”

He described those putting the flags up as “very challenging people, not patriots.”

Oxfordshire spent about £80,000 taking flags down and another £40,000 on lawyers, costs it said it intended to recover. Staff removing flags were said to have faced hostility so serious that some were told to wear face coverings and check vehicles for tracking devices after a worker’s home address was published.

The judge said maintenance teams had been “working in fear,” that people directed by the council had been obstructed “to the extent that at times they have simply given up on the removal,” and that there was “little prospect absent an injunction that it will stop.”

The order does not stop flags on private property. Oxfordshire still flies the Union Flag and the St George’s Cross at County Hall. Bearder has repeated that the case “is not, and never has been, about the flag,” and that Raise the Colours’ conduct was “nothing to do with national pride or with support for the England team during the World Cup.”

If it was never about the flag, the council would not have needed a High Court order aimed at the flag. If it was never about patriotism, Bearder would not have needed to announce that the people doing it were “not patriots.”

Long before any judge got involved, town halls were already spending public money to erase the colours from the street.

Freedom of Information requests to hundreds of local authorities showed councils had spent at least £70,000 removing Union Jacks and St George’s Crosses from lampposts and street fixtures. The true figure was higher. Many authorities folded the work into existing budgets and reported nothing.

Medway Council alone spent close to £11,600 taking down more than 700 flags. Labour councillor Alex Paterson, who oversaw community safety there, called it “money well spent” to combat “far-right agitators” and to “make the community feel safe again.”

He told the BBC: “I think at this stage the world is divided into people who know exactly why these flags were put up and those who are still pretending they don’t know why they were put up.”

Left-wing activist Pablo O’Hana, who sent some of the FoI requests, was filmed pulling flags off a Manchester bridge. He told the man who had put them up that he took them down because “that’s not what our country is.”

That is the official mind in a sentence. The country is not allowed to look like the country.

The same pattern produced a small masterpiece of modern administration in Essex. Staff were offered emotional support if they felt “discomforted” by the national flag on road signs, bridges and trees.

An internal note said: “While these symbols may hold different meanings for different people, we recognise that for many – particularly our colleagues of colour – they can evoke feelings of discomfort and be associated with anti-immigration rhetoric.”

Senior leaders invited anyone “feeling unsettled or affected by what you’re seeing” to speak to managers, “Global Majority Leads,” an assistant director or the director. The Union Flag and the St George’s Cross still flew outside headquarters. The problem was not the flag on the civic pole. The problem was the flag in the community.

Nigel Farage, as an Essex MP, called the council “totally out of touch with the county.” Lord Maurice Glasman put the priority list in one line: “You get mugged and your bag nicked and that’s nothing to do with them, but you put a flag up and it’s suddenly an issue.” Former Attorney General Sir Michael Ellis said: “This is two-tier. The council won’t fix a pothole but worry about this.”

Local jobsworths did not invent the idea that the Union Flag is a social hazard. A leaked draft of the government’s “social cohesion” strategy did the theological work for them.

The document claimed national symbols were sometimes used to “exclude or intimidate,” and that the “extreme right has tried to turn symbols of pride into tools of hate.” Flying the English, Scottish and Union flags was folded into a story of hate rather than belonging.

The 47-page draft, Protecting What Matters, leaked to The Spectator, sketched hundreds of millions of pounds for areas where cohesion was “under pressure,” a special representative to tackle hostility directed at Muslims, and a new definition of Islamophobia.

Reform UK’s Richard Tice’s verdict on the flag passage was blunt: “Absurdly, this says our national flag is a tool of hate used to intimidate. The whole paper is a divisive nonsense that should be consigned to the bin.”

A Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government spokesperson said only: “We do not comment on leaks.”

There is a word for the official twitch. Vexillophobia: fear of the flag. Not a clinical diagnosis. A political allergy. A country that treats the St George’s Cross or the Union flag as an act of aggression while other political colours are treated as inclusion.

The same institutions had no comparable panic when other flags owned the street. Palestinian colours hung from Birmingham lampposts for months. A leaked 2025 email from cabinet member Majid Mahmood, reported by the Mail, said of those Palestine flags: “We are taking these down, but we need the support of the police due to issues that have cropped (up) when we first tried to take them down.”

Conservative opposition leader Cllr Robert Alden called the contrast “completely disgraceful,” adding “Frankly, for the last two years, the council has made little effort to remove Palestine flags and now, suddenly, residents are putting up the Union Jack and St George’s Cross and they’re saying it’s a health and safety risk – it’s madness.”

Robert Jenrick called it “blatant two-tier bias against the British people.”

The World Cup made the double standard impossible to miss. Councils warned that English flags might upset “community cohesion.” Bristol talked about remaining “welcoming, respectful and safe for everyone during the tournament.” English people, in England, were told to mute their own colours in case someone else took offence.

Other authorities joined the queue. Portsmouth, Cheshire, Bristol, Oxford: flags painted off roundabouts, taken off street furniture, treated as a fire risk or an inclusivity problem, while other political symbols stayed put.

Raise the Colours did not come out of a vacuum. It followed years of mass immigration, grooming scandals, and taxpayer-funded hotels for people who arrived illegally. The official response was not to fix the conditions that produced the flags. It was to pathologise the flags.

Section 132 of the Highways Act already lets a council cut an unauthorised sign off a lamp column. What Oxfordshire wanted, and what Birmingham now wants, is something sharper: a civil injunction against the entire country, enforced by contempt of court.

An authority that needs a High Court order to keep the national flag off a lamppost is one whose officials are more frightened of displays of national pride than of the declining conditions that produced the trend in the first place.

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

How much money do you have to pay in taxes over a lifetime?

This visualization, via Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti, maps the estimated lifetime tax bill for a single filer in every U.S. state, including federal and state income taxes, as well as sales, property, and vehicle taxes.

The data for this visualization comes from Self Financial, with estimates as of June 2026.

The analysis assumes a 45-year working life with constant earnings and tax rates, a life expectancy of 79.6 years, homeownership beginning at age 40, and ownership of five vehicles over a lifetime.

New Jersey Tops the Ranking

New Jersey has the highest estimated lifetime tax bill in the country at $1.36 million.

Massachusetts follows at nearly $1.30 million, while Connecticut ranks third at $1.25 million. New Hampshire and New York round out the top five, highlighting the Northeast’s strong presence near the top of the ranking.

Florida Has the Lowest Lifetime Tax Bill

At the other end of the ranking, Florida has the lowest estimated lifetime tax bill at $508,980.

Florida’s lower total is helped by the absence of a state individual income tax, reducing the tax burden that residents pay on their earnings over time.

South Dakota is next at $515,732, followed by Arkansas at $517,942 and Oklahoma at $526,333. Together, the four lowest-ranked states have estimated lifetime tax bills ranging from about $509,000 to $526,000.

States in the Middle of the Pack

Several large states fall closer to the middle of the ranking. Texas has an estimated lifetime tax bill of $615,932, while Georgia comes in at $655,532 and Arizona at $698,824. Pennsylvania ranks higher at $835,067, putting it well above these states but still below the million-dollar mark.

Having no state individual income tax does not necessarily translate into a low overall lifetime tax bill. Washington, for example, ranks 16th at $816,217, above many states that levy an individual income tax. The estimates also account for federal income, property, sales, and vehicle taxes.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out Ranked: U.S. States With the Widest Wage Gaps on Voronoi.

Authored by David Bell and Ramesh Thakur via Brownstone Institute,

The recent release of Anthony Fauci’s diaries, followed by his refusal to answer questions in an appearance before a US Senate committee by invoking the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination 111 times, highlighted a stark divide in how the Covid pandemic was handled by public health authorities. This is as true of Australia as of the US.

Repeatedly, against certainty expressed in public to justify official statements on the origins of the virus and on lockdown, mask, and vaccine policies, their private contemporaneous conversations confirm that even the top scientists were making decisions based on scientific uncertainty.

Consequently, one of the key legacies of the public-private gap is growing distrust of official claims. That scepticism should extend to the future pandemic agenda. We rely on the World Health Organisation to coordinate among countries to prevent scourges such as pandemics reaching our shores, or at least mitigate their effects. In doing so, we must defer to an army of international bureaucrats who work in such institutions. A deference that relies on trust.

Their salaries and careers depend on convincing us to part with more of our money to support their work. Yet, according to a new article on international pandemic financing in the Cambridge journal Health Economics, Policy and Law, the WHO and World Bank rely on dubious assumptions to calculate the return on investment case on which all major international efforts to mitigate future pandemics rely.

This should alarm governments. Mitigation is worth investing in, as pandemics will occur from time to time. But the article shows that current investments will have an overall detrimental effect on global health. Most starkly, it suggests a deep rot in the quality of institutions we rely on as stewards of this commonly accepted global good.

The WHO and World Bank report, produced at the request of the G20 in 2022, proposes an annual $31.1 billion budget for pandemic preparedness and prevention, about $10.5 billion of which would come through foreign aid (including Australia). About $26 billion would come from low and middle-income countries already struggling with economic issues including burgeoning Covid debt. For context, the entire WHO budget for 2024-25 was just $3.8 billion a year.

The point of the WHO and World Bank’s argument is that if we spend such resources on preparing for pandemics, we will reap orders of magnitude greater return on investment down the road, more than a thousandfold in some wealthy countries – a bargain difficult to refuse if true.

The article from Leeds University shows that the financial arguments are based on smoke and mirrors. They rely on assumptions on the quality-adjusted life years lost to pandemics as against the big three global infectious diseases of HIV-AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria; on the share of global funds to be devoted to pandemics in comparison to the other three per life saved in each case; and on the benefits to be gained from investments in vaccines and other pharmaceutical products instead of in the more basic determinants of health resilience in the population such as nutrition, sanitation, water, and hygiene. These are the factors, along with antibiotics and gains in medical advances, that have reduced the mortality toll from pandemics since the Spanish flu of 1918.

Furthermore, the WHO and World Bank also discount the adjustments made to human behaviour to mitigate health risks as they become obvious, collateral costs of the pandemic response measures, and the likely benefits of investing in those measures.

This matters because our government has signed on to the amended International Health Regulations, is expecting to sign the proposed WHO Pandemic Agreement, and looks set to sign a UN political agreement this September advocating for yet more money for the authors and beneficiaries of the growing pandemic industry. They are promising a lot of money based on the WHO’s costings.

It matters because most Australians assumed that we could trust international institutions and that they valued rigour rather than engage in false accounting and subterfuge.

Unfortunately, incentives without accountability are a poor basis for health governance. It matters because funds to finance the pharmaceutical corporations, research institutions, and bureaucrats who stand to benefit from the pandemic agenda will have to be diverted from programs that work. International funding for the big endemic diseases and basic priorities such as nutrition is already falling, while the pandemic agenda expands. The Leeds authors call for simple transparency and honesty in assessing global health priorities, and in paying for them. Not a big ask. The Australian government has a choice to be constructive on behalf of its taxpayers and require better, or through blind acquiescence remain part of the problem.

Republished from The Australian

One day after veteran commodities strategist Jeff Currie told investors to “get long and buckle up“ for the next leg of the commodities rally, UBS strategist Sagar Khandelwal issued a similarly bullish call, urging clients to “position for a commodity upcycle.”

Khandelwal said electrification, surging power demand, artificial-intelligence infrastructure spending, persistent supply constraints, and years of underinvestment are converging to create a perfect storm for a sustained upcycle in hard assets.

Commodities can generate returns while protecting portfolios against energy disruptions and renewed inflation, he said. That defensive role becomes valuable when the toxic mixture starts hitting stocks and bonds. 

Here’s how the UBS strategist framed the trade:

Position for commodity upside

We believe commodities can provide both a structural source of return and portfolio protection in scenarios where higher inflation expectations challenge equities and bonds. While commodities have historically offered valuable diversification benefits due to their relatively low correlation with traditional asset classes, we also see a supportive longer-term backdrop driven by electrification, rising power demand, AI infrastructure investment, and supply constraints across several markets. In our view, investors should maintain diversified exposure across precious metals, energy, industrial metals, and agriculture to capture a broad range of opportunities. Given fast-shifting leadership within commodity markets, we think an actively managed approach can help investors navigate the commodity upcycle.

Gold

Gold has resumed its upward trend as US inflation concerns have ebbed, and markets have reined in expectations for near-term Federal Reserve rate hikes. Looking ahead, however, we believe central bank demand, continued diversification away from the US dollar, and global debt concerns will remain important structural supports. For investors with substantial gains following the strong rally over the past year, higher prices may provide an opportunity to rebalance some exposure into other commodity sectors. We continue to view gold as a useful strategic diversifier, and we remain constructive on gold prices over the next 12 months.

Energy

The ongoing conflict between the US and Iran highlights the fluid nature of geopolitical events and how they can impact energy. With crude supply remaining restricted and both sides facing constraints in reaching a compromise, uncertainty over how quickly shipping conditions and production will normalize is likely to keep energy markets sensitive. In our view, energy exposure can help protect against lingering supply uncertainty and inflation spillovers, while robust demand supports a constructive medium-term outlook.

Industrial metals

Industrial metals, such as copper, have benefited from secular demand drivers such as electrification, the energy transition, and the ongoing global buildout of AI infrastructure. Prices have remained resilient despite periodic global economic growth worries. While factors like tariffs and trade policy risks may keep prices volatile in the near term, demand trends remain constructive for the asset class over the longer term. In copper specifically, supply constraints and projected market deficits reinforce our positive longer-term outlook.

A look at the Quantix Commodity Index Total Return shows that the broad commodity complex has surged to a record high, gaining more than 22.5% since late June. The index tracks 24 US-dollar-denominated futures across energy, agriculture, livestock, industrial metals, and precious metals, suggesting the rally is no longer confined to a single corner of the physical world.

That momentum in the commodities index reinforces veteran Currie’s warning last week that “scarcity in the physical world” is reemerging. Already, we’re seeing London copper trading above $14,000 a ton, the Bloomberg Agriculture Spot Index breaking out to a three-year high, and European tungsten prices exceeding $3,000 a ton.

Currie’s conclusion was very blunt: “The illusion of abundance is likely behind us.”

Via Remix News,

Polish prosecutors are now investigating a “White Lives Matter” graffiti as a hate crime in the city of Rzeszów, with the suspects facing up to three years in prison if they are apprehended and convicted.

Painted on a wall in the Polish city of Rzeszów, the graffiti was reportedly created as a memorial to the murdered British youth Henry Nowak.

??? In Poland, prosecutors are now investigating a “White Lives Matter” graffiti as a hate crime, with the suspects facing up to 3 years in prison if they are apprehended and convicted.

Painted on a wall in the Polish city of Rzeszów, the graffiti was reportedly created as a… pic.twitter.com/FP1HYP0cDZ

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) August 25, 2026

Polish police have reportedly secured surveillance footage and referred the case to Polish prosecutors.

However, Polish newspaper toRzeszow claims that cameras are not in the direct area where the wall was painted, making it difficult to identify the suspects.

Authorities also painted over the entire wall.

Major Polish news outlet wPolsce24 has reacted with outrage to the investigation: “The Rzeszów case is part of a broader trend of suppressing the voices of white people who dare to remind them that their lives also have value. When black people say “Black Lives Matter,” it is a fight for equality. When white people say “White Lives Matter,” it is immediately racist.“

The news outlet further writes: “The slogan on the garages in Rzeszów was not an expression of hatred. There was a voice reminding us that white lives matters too. And as long as we treat some lives as ‘more equal’ than others, such slogans will appear on walls.”

Meanwhile, authorities claim the graffiti is illegal under article 257 of the Polish penal code, which concerns the public insult of a group of people or an individual based on national, ethnic, or racial identity.

A group labeled “Narodowy Rzeszów” allegedly posted a video of themselves standing next to the graffiti holding a banner and flares and displaying the logo of the right-wing National-Radical Camp (ONR), however, it remains unclear if they sprayed the graffiti themselves.

Their post pointed to violence against Whites in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Social media platforms took the video down.

Read more here…

Speculation has abounded over the nature of CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s surprise Tuesday trip to Moscow and what was conveyed to top Kremlin intelligence officials.

The ‘official’ Washington narrative of what was behind the trip was issued on Wednesday in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, which laid out Ratcliffe delivered a “warning to Russia not to attack NATO countries, according to people briefed on the visit.“

Since then, media reports and pundits have mused that nearby small ‘eastern flank’ countries like Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania could be prime targets for some kind of Russian military action, at a moment Europe’s support to Kiev has steadily ramped up.

Surprisingly, on Thursday former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves (president: 2006 – 2016), who remains influential voice in the European security debate and has served on an EU task force, told a European outlet that the CIA director’s meeting was more likely centered on the Iran conflict and not on warning against attacking Europe.

Ilves in a freshly published interview with EuroNews said he had “severe doubts” that concerns over aggression against the Baltic states were the reason for Ratcliffe’s visit.

“What is the real problem for the United States right now? The real problem is Iran, the fact that the Russians are giving targeting information to the Iranians,” he said.

“Those are real problems for the United States, and that would be sufficient to warrant the director of the CIA to go to Moscow to tell them to back off.”

US intelligence and Trump officials for months have alleged that Russia is likely helping Iranian forces with identifying and locating US military assets in the region. At times throughout Operation Epic Fury, Tehran appears to have even targeted CIA stations.

The bulk of American military assets and bases in the Gulf countries have suffered severe damage earlier in the conflict, resulting in a Pentagon troop drawback to safer areas. This is indeed a big deal if it is the case that Russia or China (or both) have handed the Iranians intel to help push back American bases and forces.

Former Estonian leader Ilves further explained that in reality there had been “no change in the US’s threat assessment for the Baltic states.”

Yesterday CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Moscow. The visit was brief but quickly fueled widespread discussion and speculation.

Official statements from Russia and Washington remain silent on the reason for the trip. Details about his counterparts remain unavailable as… pic.twitter.com/0W7t0i72Pq

— Chay Bowes (@BowesChay) August 26, 2026

“If the purpose was to go and genuinely tell the Russians not to do anything in the Baltic states, as was claimed, then there would be some kind of activity here,” he underscored. 

Also, Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna announced Thursday that the country’s threat assessment had “not changed”. Tsahkna said: “We remain vigilant, but Estonia’s threat assessment has not changed.”

Ilves concluded in his comments that the official narrative is but cover for the real reason underlying Ratcliff’s visit.

Skepticism has been widely voiced among independent journalists and pundits:

CIA chief urgently flew to Moscow in the middle of America’s losing war against Russia’s ally Iran, and the reason had nothing to do with a desperate attempt to turn Russia against Iran, but rather “Putin could try…limited assault on an allied country in the next few years”? 🤔 https://t.co/WmNYnGstfo

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) August 26, 2026

“I don’t think it’s a false flag, but rather just kind of make something up to divert attention from what is the real problem that the US faces right now,“ the Estonian ex-President said.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

A street interview doing the rounds this week encapsulates the entire European open-borders agenda in under two minutes.

Older Spaniards nod along when asked if they would welcome a migrant into their home, saying it would make for a much better system if everyone did so.

Solidarity, humanity, of course. Then the interviewer produces a real migrant looking for a home and suddenly everything changes.

Funniest thing I’ve watched this week.

Boomers in Spain get asked if they’d accept a migrant into their home. They say yes. Chad offers them one. And instantly, they change their mind. pic.twitter.com/2ruX39i0Mh

— Casey Krol (@CaseyKrol) August 26, 2026

The interviewer presents the couple with a Nigerian man named Sony who plays guitar on the pavement for small change – and their previous answers collapse into excuses, holidays, “not right now,” and finally “no, no, no, no, no.”

The clip, shared by Casey Krol and filmed in the Rescue You style, is the kind of unscripted moment the official narrative cannot survive. Abstract empathy and virtue signalling is easy, but when the reality of the situation is presented, everything is turned on its head.

The couple in the video are not monsters. They are ordinary people who have absorbed years of hectoring lecturing and know the approved answer. They just refuse to live it.

The same pattern repeats at every level in Europe: politicians, NGOs, and detached citizens demand that someone else absorb the costs of mass low-skilled inflows while they keep their own postcodes intact.

Spain’s socialist government has spent years selling the opposite message. Prime Minister Sánchez has called migration “one of the great engines of national development” and an “act of justice and a necessity.”

He has framed legalization as recognition that hundreds of thousands already “form part of our everyday lives.” Globalist Alex Soros praised him for it, saying Sánchez showed “what real leadership looks like” and “We need more elected leaders like him.”

The public has not bought it wholesale. A Sigma Dos poll for El Mundo found 70 percent of Spaniards support mass deportation of illegal immigrants – including 57 percent of PSOE voters. Only the far-left Sumar base rejects the idea.

The latest explosion for Spain came at the end of July when more than 70,000 people poured into the tiny North African enclave of Ceuta from Morocco in two days. Beaches, schools, and parks filled with tents, waste, and disease. Scabies, measles, and tuberculosis appeared among police and residents. Locals described playgrounds and sand turned into shit covered slums.

The chaos did not stay in Ceuta. Boats began hitting mainland tourist coves. In Cartagena, dozens of military-age men leapt onto a packed beach in full view of families. Mayor Noelia Arroyo said: “This cannot be normalised. We cannot accept that human trafficking mafias have such an easy time reaching our shores.” Former mayor Francisco Bernabe asked how a boat that size evaded radar: “Are they broken? Do they have them turned off?”

This week the tension in Ceuta boiled over again. Residents marched on the migrant camp at El Trampolín beach, tore down tents, and threw belongings into the sea. Police fired warning shots to keep the two groups apart. The city of 84,000 has been told to absorb what Madrid will not remove.

?? Ceuta residents have taken to the streets to protest the Spanish government’s handling of the migration crisis and demand the removal of migrants from public areas.

Follow: @europa pic.twitter.com/QdlyKOwB4J

— Europa.com (@europa) August 27, 2026

Sánchez oversaw a royal-decree regularization – no parliamentary vote – sold as covering 500,000 people. Applications blew past one million. Successful applicants get residence, work permits, benefits, and a path to citizenship that opens the entire Schengen zone.

The paperwork tsunami was immediate. Thousands of military-age men queued at consulates and registry offices in Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, Valencia, and Almería. Some camped overnight.

Others climbed embassy walls when appointments ran out. Union officials warned of collapse.

One municipal delegate said daily social-service requests in Madrid jumped from 1,500 to 5,500. Vox’s Santiago Abascal called it an accelerating “invasion.” Polish MEP Anna Bry?ka said left-wing governments were “bringing about the collapse of the Schengen Area and mocking the safety of Europeans.”

When patriots protested the amnesty, they were met by socialist counter-mobs.

The labor market tells the same story. Foreign-born workers now hold 52.6 percent of unskilled construction jobs and outnumber Spaniards in those roles. Since 2019 the sector has lost more than 22,000 Spanish workers and gained 238,000 foreign ones. Bricklayers, plumbers, and electricians show the same slide. Spain’s youth are not replacing the retiring generation; imported labor is.

Meanwhile, foreigners commit five times more rapes and four times more murders per capita than Spaniards. In Catalonia, 91 percent of convicted rapists are migrants, who make up 17 percent of the population. Reported rapes in Spain rose 322 percent in a decade. Penetrative rape cases more than doubled between 2019 and 2024.

The streets have turned into blood baths. Recently, a North African migrant shouted “Allah” while stabbing a young woman to death in Esplugues de Llobregat; a 58-year-old man who tried to intervene was also attacked.

The same weekend produced more stabbings and a shooting.

A man employed to evict migrant squatters was lynched and stabbed by a mob.

A Gambian migrant stabbed a police officer while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

A repeat offender stomped a local man’s head.

Citizens rioted after an elderly man was beaten.

And on and on and on.

Many of the “unaccompanied minors” driving the migrant numbers are not minors at all. In Madrid, 70 percent of those tested by bone-age X-ray were adults. The same fraud appears across Europe.

Seventy percent of the country already knows the solution is removal, not more lectures about housing the next arrival.

The people who designed this system will keep calling it compassion. They will keep living somewhere the consequences do not reach. Ordinary Spaniards are the ones facing the dire fallout.

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Authored by Heng He via The Epoch Times,

Former Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji, the hard-edged reformer who engineered China’s rise from planned-economy backwater to global manufacturing giant, died this month at the age of 97.

His legacy-tax centralization, mass layoffs, China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), and a brief, forgotten moment of tolerance toward Falun Gong-now stands as both the foundation of modern China’s wealth and a stark reminder of how easily that progress can be reversed.

Zhu’s Legacy of Economic Reform

After the decade-long Cultural Revolution pushed the regime to the brink, then-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Deng Xiaoping pivoted China toward market reforms. He relied on pragmatic trial and error rather than a rigid master plan, describing his step-by-step approach as “crossing the river by feeling the stones.”

Zhu executed that vision. As vice premier and premier from 1991 to 2003, China’s “economic tsar” used iron-fisted reforms to engineer the country’s rise, including restructuring fiscal policy, dismantling inefficient state-owned enterprises, and securing China’s entry into the WTO.

Zhu was officially credited with advancing China’s landmark tax-sharing reform in the 1990s, which centralized much of the country’s tax revenue in Beijing. That reform undeniably strengthened the central government.

However, it stripped local governments of steady tax income, forcing them to rely on selling land to fund local budgets. Paired with state ownership of land, this shift created a “land-finance” model that drove housing prices sky-high and triggered today’s ongoing property crisis.

It isn’t the tax reform alone that is to blame. China’s system of state and collective land ownership is what enabled large-scale land sales in the first place.

The obituary also praises Zhu for safeguarding Hong Kong’s status as a global financial center. Ironically, Hong Kong’s diminished standing today stems largely from policies adopted under CCP leader Xi Jinping-making praise for Zhu an implicit rebuke of China’s current leadership.

WTO Entry-and Its Costs

One of Zhu’s most consequential achievements was leading China to join the WTO in 2001.

To prepare the country for global trade, Zhu aggressively restructured inefficient state-owned enterprises. While this boosted efficiency, it triggered mass layoffs, displacing tens of millions of workers.

Unlike post-Cold War America, China’s nascent private sector was too weak to absorb the surge of unemployed labor.

The aggressive restructuring stripped millions of workers of their livelihoods, leaving them with virtually no safety net. While the reforms eventually sparked massive economic growth, the workers who bore the cost were largely left behind without fair compensation.

The Premier Who Called Out Shoddy Construction

When the Yangtze River dikes failed during the 1998 summer floods, Zhu inspected the breach in Jiujiang, Jiangxi Province, and discovered that the construction had cut corners and used shoddy materials. Furious, he publicly denounced the dam as a “bastard project” and dubbed it a “tofu-dregs project”-comparing the crumbling concrete to the brittle, worthless pulp residue left over from making soy curd.

As long as corruption remains a recurring public concern in China, the term “tofu-dreg project” will likely remain part of the country’s political vocabulary and a defining mark of Zhu’s legacy.

The Premier Who Listened-Meeting With Falun Gong

One episode stands apart from Zhu’s economic legacy. In the late 1990s, Zhu and the entire Politburo Standing Committee opposed then-CCP leader Jiang Zemin’s decision to suppress Falun Gong, according to insider accounts.

On April 25, 1999, roughly 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners gathered peacefully near Zhongnanhai, the CCP’s headquarters, in Beijing to petition the authorities for freedom of belief. Earlier in the month, dozens of practitioners in Tianjin had been detained by local police for their faith.

In a bold move for an official, Zhu met directly with representatives, listened to their grievances, and ordered the release of the detained practitioners, along with an assurance that practitioners would have a lawful environment in which to pursue their practice.

The spiritual discipline was introduced to the Chinese public in 1992 and gained widespread popularity, attracting at least 70 million practitioners by the late 1990s.

At an internal leadership meeting the following day, according to insider accounts, Zhu suggested that suppression would harm the country’s image and that the regime should leave Falun Gong practitioners alone. Jiang, afraid of the practice’s growing popularity, responded that doing so would bring down the Party.

Months later, Jiang launched a sweeping, nationwide campaign against Falun Gong-initiating a persecution that continues today.

Reform Can Be Reversed Overnight

Zhu’s death cast an unexpected shadow over Xi’s plans to commemorate Jiang with unusually high political honors, an effort intended to elevate Jiang alongside the CCP’s founding generation. Instead of highlighting Jiang’s legacy, Zhu’s passing reminded the public that the reforms of China’s most prosperous era owed far more to Zhu.

It was Zhu who was behind Deng and the CCP in launching the Shanghai Stock Exchange in December 1990-now a global financial powerhouse that hosts major state-owned enterprise listings.

Although Zhu was the official most responsible for driving China’s reform era, Xi’s policies have now largely dismantled that work. That contrast reveals the ultimate lesson of Zhu’s legacy: under totalitarian rule, no amount of reform is secure-it can all be undone overnight.

Federal regulators have cleared a blood test aimed at detecting signs of Alzheimer’s disease.

The Food and Drug Administration cleared a blood test known as Elecsys pTau-217 for people aged at least 55 who have shown signs of, or have been complaining of, cognitive decline, Roche announced on Aug. 24.

The test, which can be used by primary care doctors and specialists, detects a biomarker called plasma phosphorylated tau 217. In a study that ran from 2004 to 2025 and was published in JAMA, researchers found that higher levels of the biomarker were associated with an increased risk of progression to cognitive impairment.

As Zachary Stieber reports via The Epoch Times, the FDA has previously approved several other tests for Alzheimer’s, beginning in 2025 with a test from Fujirebio Diagnostics that measures both pTau217 and another protein. Roche said its test is the first to measure a single biomarker.

“Elecsys pTau217 has the potential to transform how Alzheimer’s is assessed across primary and specialty care,” Dan Malarek, president and CEO of Roche Diagnostics North America, said in a statement.

“This kind of innovation can help bring diagnostic evaluation closer to patients and give clinicians greater confidence in determining the right step in their care.”

Alzheimer’s is a brain disorder that destroys a person’s memory and thinking skills over time. People with the disease gradually become unable to perform tasks such as eating and walking. Many people begin experiencing symptoms such as memory difficulties between the ages of 60 and 70.

The Alzheimer’s Association and other groups have welcomed the tests as a less invasive option than other methods, such as testing of cerebrospinal fluid.

“Each FDA clearance gives clinicians another validated option to work with when evaluating patients showing signs of cognitive impairment,” Maria C. Carrillo, the association’s chief science officer and medical affairs lead, said in a statement.

“That’s real progress for a field that, for decades, had far too few tools to offer.”

Dr. Carole Ho, executive vice president and president of Lilly Neuroscience, which helped develop the test, said in a statement that “for millions of families navigating the uncertainty of Alzheimer’s disease, a timely diagnosis is the first and most critical step toward meaningful care.”

Labcorp and Quest Diagnostics said they will carry the new test.

Once ordered by a doctor, patients can have their blood drawn for the test in a doctor’s office, a Labcorp service center, or a Quest center.