Authored by Bryan Hyde via American Greatness,

Virginia Democrats, along with their state Attorney General, have asked the US Supreme Court to override the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision last week that struck down a partisan redistricting plan.

ABC News reports Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones wrote in the emergency application filed on Monday that the Virginia Supreme Court was “deeply mistaken” when it invalidated a ballot measure to amend the state constitution that would have netted Democrats as many as four new congressional seats.

The state Supreme Court had ruled last Friday, in a 4–3 decision, that Democrats had violated the state Constitution, by failing to follow proper procedures, while racing to get the measure on the ballot before the midterm elections.

According to SCOTUSblog, Virginia’s General Assembly adopted a new map in February that would have favored Democrats in 10 of the state’s 11 seats in the US House—a potential increase of four seats from the current balance between Democrats and Republicans in Virginia.

The new map hinged on obtaining approval for an amendment to the Virginia constitution that would give the state legislature the power to draw a new congressional map outside of the normal cycle following the decennial census.

In a referendum held in April, Virginia voters approved that amendment by a margin of three percentage points.

The Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the referendum was not valid because the General Assembly had not followed proper procedures when it put the new amendment on the ballot.

In Monday’s 24-page filing, Jones argued:

“The irreparable harm resulting from the Supreme Court of Virginia’s decision is profound and immediate. By forcing the Commonwealth to conduct its congressional elections using districts different from those adopted by the General Assembly pursuant to a constitutional amendment the people just ratified, the Supreme Court of Virginia has deprived voters, candidates, and the Commonwealth of their right to the lawfully enacted congressional districts.”

Legal experts told ABC News last week that they believe Democrats have little chance of a successful appeal at the US Supreme Court because the state Supreme Court would be the highest authority dealing with state constitutional issues and no federal issues are at stake.

According to former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, “The Virginia Supreme Court is the final authority on Virginia constitutional questions. This is the end, folks. You will have the same map in 2026 that existed in 2024. That is now unchangeable and immutable.”

Politico reports that Chief Justice John Roberts, who oversees emergency appeals arising from Virginia, instructed the Republicans who challenged the Virginia referendum to respond to Jones’ appeal by Thursday at 5 p.m.

🚨 JUST IN: It’s now being speculated the US Supreme Court will LAUGH Virginia Democrats OUT OF THE ROOM after they just filed with SCOTUS to reinstate their draconian 10D-1R gerrymandered House map

Dems want the federal court to NULLIFY their own State Supreme Court and… pic.twitter.com/5Q0KtVULKH

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) May 11, 2026

Summary:

• Cattle ranchers respond with first-takes on proposed policies from White House 

• Tuesday: Trump team is “fine-tuning” an executive order aimed at reducing ‌domestic beef prices

• Monday: Tyson Sinks, Walmart Falls After Trump Moves To Temporarily Lower Beef Import Tariffs

Ranchers Respond

Following Monday afternoon’s WSJ report that the White House will temporarily cut beef import tariffs, we spoke with three ranchers across America’s beef-producing corridor, centered on the Great and Southern Plains, to gauge industry sentiment.

The message from all three, including Elkins Cattle Company, Beck Ranch, and KC Cattle Company, premier ranchers featured in the ZeroHedge Store, was broadly the same: the proposed policy may briefly ease pressure on ground beef prices at the supermarket, but it does little to address the deeper structural crisis facing the nation’s cattle herd and could further weaken domestic producers.  

With U.S. herds already near historic lows and ranchers still battered by elevated costs for diesel, labor, fertilizer, equipment, and transportation, a flood of cheap imported beef risks pushing cattle prices lower without reducing producers’ operating expenses.

In other words, Trump’s potential move to ease beef prices at the store appears aimed at boosting affordability ahead of the midterms. What needs to happen is for the administration to push pro-growth policies that rebuild America’s cattle supply over the medium to long term.

By Tuesday morning, Reuters reports that the Trump team is “fine-tuning” an executive order aimed at reducing ‌domestic beef prices.

“The president is committed to lowering beef and other grocery costs for everyday Americans, and the administration is accordingly fine-tuning potential executive actions to alleviate temporary shortages in the domestic beef market,” the White House told the outlet in an emailed statement.

Here’s the first take from Tim Elkins of Elkins Cattle Company (of Texas):

Here is how I see it:

Tariff-rate quota is basically a penalty threshold that gets removed. This in turn, allows imported beef to enter at lower tarrifs. US cattle herds are at record lows BUT we have slowly been rebuilding. By removing this barrier this is going to drive cattle prices down.

While that’s GOOD for consumers, it’s VERY bad for us cattle ranchers. Our input costs are still sky high. Think: Transport (diesel costs), tractor parts, labor, fertilizer etc. These costs DONT come down for us with this. It just makes us compete with lower cost, lower quality imported beef.

With supply rising due to this, it will lower consumer costs, but it doesn’t change our input costs. We already have been subsiding a lot of the costs because the consumer will simply not pay the prices, meaning lower profit margins to us.

To the point of barely surviving the way it is today with cattle prices are RECORD HIGHS. The main brunt of this will be felt amongst Cow-Calf operators (who grow herds) and stocker operations (feeders).

The BIG winners here, again, is the BIG 4 packers who have a monopoly on the industry. (Tyson, JBS, Cargill, National Beef).

Lowers costs for them while putting American Ranchers/Farmers in the backseat… If these imports suppress cattle prices, as I expect they will, US-based ranchers will likely not grow herds aggressively in a time where herds are already EXTREMELY low.

This doesn’t fix anything and in fact kicks the can down the road to a bigger problem. Also, most of this will be seen in “Trimmings” of the cow often used to make ground beef/hamburgers.

Due to the quality of the animals coming in from oversees being so much worse than US raised beef, it is HIGHLY unlikely that you will see your higher end steak prices come down at all.

Our “trimmings” prices, which typically is the only area cattle producers can make any return on, will be forced lower, which will CRUSH US beef producers.

However, your typical McDonald’s burger, at today’s prices, will just return the difference to big corporations and the BIG 4. By NO WAY, does this support US ranches/farms. Rather, puts most on the brink of total collapse.

I think personally that this is a serious threat on US producers and will strain many ranchers to the point of shutting their doors.

Over time, we have put the BIG 4 in the driver’s seat while ignoring the folks that have done all the heavy lifting and doing the right thing day after day.

Second take is from Annalisa Beck of Bech Ranch (of Wyoming):

Tariff-rate quota suspension is intended to address short-term beef supply shortages and high consumer prices. This will only be a short-term fix.

The price of the calf at auction is currently at its highest. The entire cattle-raising part of the country is in a drought.

The price of hay, fertilizer, diesel fuel, and other inputs are at their highest. Those high-priced calves haven’t even hit the store shelves yet; we are about a year away from that.

However, we have seen a dramatic increase in the direct-to-consumer prices, especially in the operations that don’t raise all of their own cows from birth (some are selling their ground beef for $18/lb – this makes me want to choke).

The only way to fix the problem long term is to lower input prices (diesel, fertilizer, hay), lower the price the rancher is getting at auction (which will actually force more ranchers out of the system), or realize that $12 for a pound of ground beef that will feed a family of 4 at $3/serving is really not that expensive when everyone is ok with a $7 12 oz latte, or a $14 value meal that only feeds one person.

I think instead of screaming that the prices are too high, we need to educate the consumer that good, locally raised, nutrient-dense food is worth the investment.

The third take is from Patrick Montgomery of KC Cattle Company (of Missouri):

I understand why the Trump administration is doing this. Beef is too expensive at the grocery store. The cattle inventory is at historic lows. RFK is publicly pleading with American ranchers to stop selling their breeding stock and they won’t, because the economics of ranching are broken. Your average cattleman wants to retire and there is no next generation replacing him. Trump needs consumer prices down by the midterms and suspending the TRQ is the fastest lever he can pull.

I get it. But this is a band-aid on an arterial bleed.

The real problem is structural and neither side of the aisle will touch it. Fix the money. Not through more subsidies. Not through grants. Bring back an actual free market for agriculture.

America is not capable of feeding its own populace anymore.

Here is why.

Crop land. America’s farmland overwhelmingly produces corn and soybeans. Much of that goes to export or gets processed into products we should not be consuming. Why? Because it is heavily subsidized and farmers are incentivized to grow it. This has been the case for over 50 years, dating back to Earl Butz’s “get big or get out” USDA policy in the early 1970s. Before Butz, American farms were diversified. After Butz, we became a monoculture economy. Ironically, Butz was Cargill’s guy.

If our country ripped away those subsidies today it would be disastrous because we have lost the ability to grow anything else at scale. We don’t have the implements for American farmers to produce vegetables and diversified crops at volume. We have degraded our soil health with decades of artificial fertilizers, herbicides, and fungicides. We do not have the logistics infrastructure to move a consumable product from an American farm to an American kitchen. And we have lost the institutional knowledge. Three generations of farmers have known nothing but corn and beans.

Protein is equally broken. Why would anyone start a ranching operation to break even or lose money and on a good year net 2%? Warren Buffett would not invest in that business and neither will the next generation of farmers.

Since the pandemic we have exported our beef production to countries like Brazil at an accelerating rate. According to Austin Frerick’s book Barons, Brazil dedicates a landmass the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined to producing beef for the American market. Brazilian companies own controlling equity in two of the Big Four packers. JBS is publicly traded and their annual 10K filings over the last few years are fascinating if you understand what has been happening to the domestic supply chain. Why would Brazilian-owned companies care if American ranches disappear? That is good for their business. Happy to go deeper on that if it is useful.

Our largest pork producer is Smithfield, owned by a CCP-held entity. Given the current state of the world that should concern everyone.

The part that scares me most. Syngenta controls the proprietary seed genetics that go into American farm ground. Syngenta is directly owned by the CCP. Subsidized dollars from American farmers flow directly into a Chinese state owned company that controls what we can plant and how we plant it.

So what is the fix? Fix the money.

We do not need more subsidies. We need food sovereignty. American farmers cannot compete against imports produced under less regulation at cheaper cost. Suspending the TRQ makes that problem worse in the short term even if it helps consumers at the register.

I do like the SBA access-to-capital piece. That is the single hardest barrier in farming. But without structural reform, those dollars end up subsidizing the mega corporations that sit between the farmer and the consumer, not the farmer.

One more layer to this that I think matters.

Peter Zeihan has been writing for years about the unraveling of the post World War 2 global trade order. The system established at Bretton Woods in 1944, where America guaranteed freedom of the seas and open markets in exchange for alliance solidarity, has governed global commerce for 80 years. That system is coming apart. We are watching it in real time. The fallout with the EU. Britain going its own direction. The fracturing of traditional trade partnerships including with China. Increasingly common conflicts involving Iran and Venezuela designed to apply pressure. Our own push toward energy independence.

The world is becoming less global and more national. Most people in Washington understand this when it comes to energy. When it comes to semiconductors. When it comes to defense manufacturing.

The question I hear no one in power asking is this. What happens if we poke the bear and they turn off our food? What is the contingency plan for a country that cannot feed itself without foreign controlled supply chains, foreign owned processing, and foreign owned seed genetics?

Maybe that plan exists and it is classified. But I do not see how it works when the same entities that control our protein processing also have deep economic ties to the countries we are applying pressure to. Follow the ownership structures. Follow the money. The vulnerability is not theoretical. It is sitting in plain sight.

That is why food sovereignty is not a consumer issue. It is a national security issue. And until the people making policy treat it that way, we are going to keep putting bandaids on a problem that requires surgery.

Support America’s independent, family-run ranchers with a purchase from the ZeroHedge Store.

Tyson Sinks, Walmart Falls After Trump Moves To Temporarily Lower Beef Import Tariffs

Tyson Foods and Walmart shares moved lower around noon in New York, while major Brazilian meatpacker Minerva Foods moved higher on a Wall Street Journal report that says the White House will temporarily cut beef import tariffs

According to the WSJ report, the plan would suspend the annual tariff-rate quota, which imposes higher duties once import limits are reached, allowing more foreign beef to flood the U.S. at lower tariff rates to suppress soaring prices.

The move comes as the U.S. cattle herd has fallen to a 75-year low, driving the latest USDA national average supermarket beef prices to near $7 per pound, squeezing meat processors and pushing consumers into trade-downs to cheaper proteins such as chicken and pork.

Walmart shares are down about 2.5% around noon.

Tyson Foods shares dropped about 4.5%.

Meanwhile, Brazilian meatpacker Minerva is up nearly 2%.

Related beef coverage: 

• “No Quick Fixes”: Supply-Chain Deep Dive Shows Beef Prices To Remain High

• US Beef Cow Cycle Low Set To Deepen, Keeping Steak Prices High

• DoJ Opens Criminal Probe Into Meatpacking Cartel As Food Stocks Slide

The move by the Trump administration to put a ceiling on ground beef and steak prices comes ahead of the midterm elections, as a race to make things more affordable in the wake of the energy price spike following the U.S.-Iran war becomes a central focus again.

We suspect U.S. ranchers won’t be too happy about foreign meats set to flood the U.S. in even greater quantities. 

A total of 11 hantavirus cases have been confirmed as of Tuesday morning, with global health officials warning that the number could rise.

The risk to the public from an illness called the hantavirus is low, a U.S. official said on May 11.

“Let me be crystal clear: the risk of hantavirus to the general public remains very, very low,” Dr. Brian Christine, assistant secretary for health and head of the U.S. Public Health Service, told reporters during a briefing in Omaha, Nebraska.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had said in a May 8 health alert to doctors and health departments that doctors should be aware that imported hantavirus cases were possible but that “the risk of broad spread to the United States is considered extremely unlikely at this time.”

As Zachary Stieber reports for The Epoch Times, multiple people on board the M.V. Hondius, which departed from Argentina on April 1 and traveled to remote locations, including Antarctica, contracted a variant of the hantavirus called the Andes variant.

Three have died.

Christine said on Monday that “the Andes variant of this virus does not spread easily, and it requires prolonged close contact with someone who is already symptomatic.”

An American cruise ship passenger who tested positive on one test and negative on another was transported early Monday to the biocontainment unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, officials said. That individual is doing well and has no symptoms, Dr. Angela Hewlett, director of the unit, said at the briefing. That person will be tested again at some point.

Fifteen other Americans, including a British American, who were on the Hondius were admitted around the same time into a separate area called the quarantine unit. They have not displayed symptoms. They may be tested, based on conversations between physicians and those individuals, officials said.

Two additional Americans who were aboard the ship were transported to a biocontainment unit at Emory University in Atlanta. One of those Americans has shown symptoms of hantavirus; the other is that person’s partner.

The people being cared for at the facilities in Nebraska and Georgia can leave after they have been symptom-free for at least a few days, according to Dr. Brendan Jackson, acting director of the CDC’s Division of High-Consequence Pathogens and Pathology.

Other Americans who previously left the Hondius are in contact with state officials and have been told that if they develop symptoms, they should alert their doctors and those officials, Jackson said.

Symptoms of the hantavirus include fever, fatigue, and shortness of breath.

The virus typically spreads from contact with infected rodents, but officials say it may have been transmitted from person-to-person on the cruise ship.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, acting CDC director, said over the weekend that hantavirus is “not COVID” because it does not transmit as easily.

“I can assure you that the CDC has been absolutely on top of this outbreak,” he said.

“There’s not a great wealth of information,” said WHO epidemiologist Olivier le Polain during a public briefing Monday.

“We don’t know how much it might spread just before people develop symptoms.”

Decades of experience in South America have shown the virus to be associated with “rare human-to-human transmission after close and prolonged contact with a sick, infected person,” Erica Pan, California’s public health officer, told reporters Monday.

But the available evidence is limited.

No indications of a larger outbreak of the deadly hantavirus have appeared so far, a World Health Organization official said on May 12.

“At the moment, there is no sign that we are seeing the start of a larger outbreak,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the organization’s director-general, told reporters in Madrid, Spain, during a press conference with Spain’s prime minister.

“But, of course, the situation could change, and given the long incubation period of the virus, it’s possible we might see more cases in the coming weeks.”

The incubation period for the Andes variant of the virus is up to 42 days.

By Benjamin Picton, Senior Markets Strategist At Rabobank

Massive Live Support

“On massive life support” was Donald Trump’s characterization of the US-Iran ceasefire yesterday. This followed Sunday’s rejection of Iranian terms for peace that Trump described as “totally unacceptable”. In a boy-who-cried-wolf-style sign of growing market insensitivity to Presidential prognostications, Brent was only up 2.88% to $104.21/bbl and WTI crude remains below $100/bbl. Dated Brent rose by 0.6% yesterday to $105.62. This even as the Wall Street Journal reports that the UAE has been “secretly” carrying out attacks on Iran, including on refining infrastructure. 

US equities closed broadly higher but European stocks were mixed. The FTSE100 eked out gains despite (because of?) fresh signs that Keir Starmer’s premiership is also on “massive life support” as more than 70 of his own MPs have now publicly voiced opinions that the Prime Minister should go following last week’s shellacking at the hands of the Reform party in local government elections. The French CAC40 fell by 0.69% and the German DAX was virtually unchanged. Asian stocks also had a mixed session earlier in the day with losses for Japanese and Australian indices, but gains for chip-heavy markets in China, South Korea and Taiwan.

Bond markets have been more unified in their gloom over the last 24 hours. Yields on US 10s were unchanged at 4.41%, but virtually everywhere else saw chunky rises in benchmark borrowing costs. Yields on 10-year OATs were up 3.9bps, 3.5bps for Bunds, while Gilts saw yields spike 8.6bps in a sign that bond traders might be thinking it’s a case of “better the devil you know” when it comes left-of-centre Prime Ministers in the UK.

With the prime ministerial instability gauge now well and truly pointed towards “embattled”, Starmer gave a speech yesterday that was intended to strike a tone of defiance and send the message that he wouldn’t be going anywhere. In that speech he suggested that he had not been sufficiently radical in forcing the pace of change, that the UK needed to forge closer military and economic ties with the EU, and that “if we don’t get this right, our country will go down a very dark path” – by which he presumably means it would elect Nigel Farage as his replacement.

This might sound like a curious response to the rising appeal of a Eurosceptic party channelling popular sentiment that the country has already changed too much, too fast, while the incumbent government’s revealed lack of electoral appeal suggests that many voters think the country is already headed down a very dark path under Starmer’s leadership. The implication here is that Starmer isn’t really fighting Reform, but the rise of the left-wing Green party who are siphoning off erstwhile Labour votes. Clearly, the center cannot hold and we should expect even more intense polarisation ahead, and probably more damage to the budget. Whither the Gilt market?

Speaking of budgets, Starmer isn’t the only Anglosphere Labour leader saying that things aren’t changing fast enough. Australian PM Albanese made the same comment in relation to his country’s poisonously expensive housing market this week as his Treasurer prepares to deliver the Commonwealth budget later today.

As is now the norm for budgets, most of the major initiatives have been strategically leaked well in advance and a wind-back of investor tax concessions has been telegraphed as a social cohesion measure to placate Gen Zs angry about their effect on house prices (for our detailed thoughts on this, see here). The budget is also expected to introduce new rules for discretionary trust distributions to be taxed at the company rate (to reduce their appeal as a tax-minimisation device) alongside measures to boost defence spending and cut the pace of growth in the welfare state – something that Starmer was unable to secure support for among his own MPs.

Treasurer Chalmers has said there will be a focus on resilience with “more than the usual amount of savings, and more than the usual amount of [tax] reform”. Overall, the vibe seems to be a tightening of fiscal settings – which ought to be welcomed by the RBA – coupled with tax nudges to direct a greater volume of capital toward the productive sectors of the economy rather than allowing it to congeal in the housing market. Whither Aussie bonds?

Of course, while all this is going on the Strait of Hormuz remains functionally closed and world fertilizer and energy markets are treading air like Wile-e-Coyote run off the cliff. Donald Trump will be traveling to Beijing tomorrow to meet with Xi Jinping. Finding a resolution to the war is sure to be at the top of the agenda, with Trump likely to press Xi to lean on his Iranian and Russian allies to seek peace in their respective theatres. Russia has made conciliatory noises in recent days, while Iran has indicated a willingness to hand over some highly enriched uranium to an unspecified third party (Russia?). Is there a grand bargain to be made?

In a case of curious timing, the US just imposed fresh sanctions on individuals and firms involved in facilitating Iranian oil sales to China, and Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao yesterday released a new 30-year shipbuilding plan. That plan anticipates the acquisition of 11 nuclear-powered Trump class battleships, new underwater drones, and an ongoing review to the Ford class aircraft carrier design to increase lethality and reliability while reducing unit costs and production lead times. The planned expansion of the US fleet and shipbuilding industrial base is undoubtedly a reaction to China’s growing naval strength and substantial advantage in production capacity. The message to Xi is an unsubtle one.

The FT’s Gideon Rachman characterises Trump as arriving at Xi’s court in a state of supplication, having effectively lost the trade war vs China and the shooting war vs Iran. This perhaps overstates the weakness of Trump’s position by ignoring the fact that the US has tightened its grip on global energy supply chains and has shown that is has the power to put its foot on the hosepipe of Chinese energy imports whenever it likes. In the flurry of commentary over China’s bumper trade surplus in April, it seems to have been missed that import volumes for crude oil were down sharply, but values were higher. Yesterday’s April PPI figures for China also underscored the uncomfortable effects that the Iran war is having on the Chinese industrial economy.

Xi will be acutely aware of this, and he will also be aware that the US holds similar power to disrupt Chinese food imports if it was of a mind to do so. Seapower IS power, as the shipbuilding plan should remind us all. In this respect, Trump holds better cards than the FT is giving him credit for. Perhaps it is no coincidence that China bought more soybeans in April than it had done for months.

Anthropic warned investors that any unapproved sale or transfer of its private shares, including those packaged through tokenized products, is void and will not be recognized on the company’s books, escalating tensions over how restricted pre-IPO equity can be repackaged for retail traders. 

The AI company behind Claude quietly updated its investor-warning page Monday, stating that both preferred and common stock are subject to transfer restrictions contained in its bylaws. The notice, first published in February and revised this week, explicitly bans special purpose vehicles from acquiring its stock and casts doubt on structures claiming economic exposure to Anthropic shares.

“Any sale or transfer of Anthropic stock, or any interest in Anthropic stock, that has not been approved by our Board of Directors is void and will not be recognized on our books and records,” the company said. “This means that if someone purports to sell Anthropic shares without proper board approval, that transaction is invalid.”

Anthropic added that it does not permit special purpose vehicles to acquire its stock and that any such transfers are void. It also warned that third parties offering Anthropic shares to the public through direct sales, forward contracts, tokenized securities, or similar mechanisms are likely engaged in fraud or offering investments that may have no value.

“We do not permit special purpose vehicles (SPVs) to acquire Anthropic stock and any transfer of shares to an SPV are void under our transfer restrictions. Offers to invest in Anthropic’s past or future financing rounds through an SPV are prohibited.” 

The company listed several firms as unauthorized, including Open Door Partners, Unicorns Exchange, Pachamama, Lionheart Ventures, Sydecar, Upmarket, and new offerings on Hiive and Forge Global.

Tokenized Markets in the Crosshairs

The update directly addresses the growing market for tokenized pre-IPO exposure. Over the past year, crypto platforms have created offerings tied to high-profile private companies such as Anthropic, SpaceX, and others. Some products are synthetic perpetuals that track implied valuations without holding underlying shares. Others, including certain tokenized offerings on PreStocks, aim to provide economic exposure through SPVs or secondary holdings.

Anthropic just published a statement that should terrify anyone buying private AI shares on secondary markets.

>>>>“Any sale or transfer of Anthropic stock… that has not been approved by our Board of Directors is void.”

Not restricted.
Not disputed.
Not under review.

Void.… pic.twitter.com/HjILRsdBku

— Swati Gupta (@hrswatigupta) May 12, 2026

PreStocks’ terms state that buyers receive no equity or shareholder rights in the underlying company, only economic exposure tied to reserve backing. However, the platform does not specify whether its Anthropic-linked tokens are structured through an SPV, leaving uncertainty around compliance with Anthropic’s restrictions.

PreStocks’ terms of service state that buyers receive no equity or shareholder rights in the underlying company, only economic exposure tied to reserve backing, However, it does not specify whether this exposure is delivered through a special purpose vehicle, leaving uncertainty around the exact structure behind its Anthropic-linked tokens, which the company says may be invalid.

That model may be more intuitive to investors, but it also runs more directly into the restrictions private companies place on who can buy, sell or hold interests in their stock. –Coindesk

Tokenized markets can generate eye-popping implied valuations even with limited underlying assets. PreStocks’ dashboard recently showed an implied valuation for Anthropic above $1.5 trillion and a market valuation around $1.37 trillion, despite the platform holding roughly $23 million in total assets, according to CoinDesk. Such prices create narrative and valuation risks that private companies cannot fully control. 

Florida-based crypto lawyer John Montague told the outlet last year “I think private companies may also initiate lawsuits alleging that this violates their governance documents, shareholders’ agreements, investor rights agreements, or bylaws,” adding “I view it as the issuer’s right to control the terms of transfer.”

The Anthropic-linked token on PreStocks fell nearly 25% in a single day following the announcement, dropping to $1,023.90.

No public responses from the named platforms or firms had been issued as of Tuesday. The move follows a similar policy clarification by OpenAI and is expected to increase scrutiny of secondary and tokenized markets for private technology companies.

Anthropic, valued at $380 billion following its February funding round, directed equity-related inquiries to a dedicated email address and urged investors to verify offerings through regulatory channels and seek independent advice.

The frenzy around Anthropic equity has reached unusual levels. Last month, Bay Area investment banker Storm Duncan offered his $4.8 million Mill Valley estate in exchange for Anthropic shares rather than cash, highlighting how illiquid and highly sought-after the company’s pre-IPO stock has become.

The company has not issued further public comment beyond the updated notice.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

A declassified CIA document that references a “Temple under Sphinx” in a 76 year old photographic inventory, has reignited interest in a mythical Hall of Records said to lie beneath Egypt’s Great Sphinx.

The document in question is a CIA inventory cataloging black-and-white photo negatives from July 1950. Among routine entries such as “Sphinx,” “Tourist at Pyramids,” and “Ruins near Sphinx” appears the line: “Temple under Sphinx; July ’50.”

This phrasing has prompted renewed discussion about possible hidden structures beneath the Sphinx, a topic long associated with Edgar Cayce’s prophecies of an underground Hall of Records containing ancient knowledge.

Read more ⬇️ https://t.co/XKVD737uhC

— Daily Mail US (@Daily_MailUS) May 11, 2026

The Hall of Records legend describes a repository of Atlantean or pre-dynastic wisdom hidden near the right paw of the Sphinx. 

While mainstream archaeology has not confirmed any such chamber, the CIA reference has added a new layer to existing theories.

This development ties directly into earlier reports of potential subterranean features at the Giza plateau. 

Last year we highlighted claims by Italian and Scottish researchers using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) scans that purported to reveal a vast underground complex beneath the pyramids.

The researchers detailed eight vertical cylindrical shafts extending over 2,100 feet deep, connected chambers, and structures potentially linking the three main pyramids and the Sphinx area.

Spokesperson Nicole Ciccolo claimed the findings suggest “The existence of vast chambers beneath the earth’s surface, comparable in size to the pyramids themselves, which have a remarkably strong correlation between the legendary Halls of Amenti.”

She added: “These new archaeological findings could redefine our understanding of the sacred topography of ancient Egypt, providing spatial coordinates for previously unknown and unexplored subterranean structures.”

The project, headed by Corrado Malanga and Filippo Biondi, has faced scientific scrutiny. Critics have noted that the non-peer-reviewed study relied on satellite radar data whose depth penetration and interpretation remain debated. Some experts called for ground verification through excavation, while others questioned whether the anomalies represented natural geological features or man-made constructions.

The Sphinx and Giza pyramids have long been subjects of both rigorous archaeological study and alternative theories. Official excavations around the Sphinx have revealed known temples and passages at surface level, including the Sphinx Temple itself. 

No verified underground “Hall of Records” has been located despite extensive modern scanning projects such as the ScanPyramids initiative, which has identified smaller voids in other pyramids.

The CIA file itself is publicly available through the agency’s reading room and forms part of routine declassified photographic records rather than any classified intelligence operation.

Nevertheless, the combination of the 1952 reference and the 2025 radar claims has fueled online discussion and calls for further non-invasive investigation at Giza. 

Egypt’s antiquities authorities have not issued immediate comment on the latest document reference, consistent with their general stance on unverified subterranean claims.

Researchers continue to debate the limits of remote-sensing technology for deep subsurface mapping at Giza. While ground-penetrating radar and electrical resistivity tomography have yielded results in shallower contexts, claims of multi-thousand-foot structures remain unconfirmed without physical access.

The story highlights the enduring fascination with Egypt’s ancient monuments and the way archival documents can intersect with modern scientific assertions. 

Whether the “Temple under Sphinx” notation points to a now-lost surface feature, a mislabeled photograph, or something more significant continues to be examined by enthusiasts and scholars alike.

As new scanning techniques evolve and historical records surface, the Giza plateau may yet reveal additional layers of its complex history—above or below ground.

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.

UK Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, is on the brink this morning as The Telegraph reports that six Cabinet Ministers reportedly call on him privately to quit and the number of MPs on the record saying he must go reaches 84.

The Telegraph learnt before the meeting that six ministers – Shabana Mahmood, John Healey, Ed Miliband, Lisa Nandy, Yvette Cooper and Wes Streeting – had been expected to demand Sir Keir’s resignation.

However the Prime Minister did not give Ministers a chance to speak against him and instead set out his case on why he should remain in office.

He told Ministers: “The Labour Party has a process for challenging a leader and that has not been triggered. The country expects us to get on with governing. That is what I am doing and what we must do as a Cabinet.”

He then spent the rest of the hour discussing policy issues and the impact of the Iran war.

Rebecca Long-Bailey, who served under Jeremy Corbyn and was sacked from Sir Keir’s shadow cabinet in August 2020, demanded that the Prime Minister “end this chaos” and set out a timetable for an orderly leadership transition.

Long-Bailey, the 84th MP to call for the Prime Minister’s departure, said:

“Many former Labour voters now feel our party is no longer on their side.”

“What we witnessed with the last government was the chaos of constantly changing leaders,” Starmer said.

“And it cost this country a huge amount, a huge amount.”

Some Labour MPs are now talking down the prospect of higher spending despite many of the party’s critics of Downing Street calling for a more relaxed approach to borrowing at various points since Starmer was elected in 2024.

“I don’t think there’s anyone who’s seriously asking for large unfunded pledges,” said Yuan Yang, a Labour MP on parliament’s Treasury Committee.

“We understand the importance of fiscal rules, we understand the importance of getting down the cost of borrowing.”

Still, others on the left of Labour are touting various ways to boost public services.

But, despite that placting, the pound extended losses on Tuesday morning, down more than 0.5% to $1.3536 having traded above $1.3650 the previous day. Gilts came under further pressure, with the yield on 10-year notes jumping beyond 5.10% on Tuesday as bond investors expressed concern that any replacement for Starmer would increase fiscal spending, potentially driving borrowing costs higher. The yield on 30-year debt hit its highest level since 1998.

Finally, as Nick Corbishly writes in detail via NakedCapitalism, Starmer’s rapid rise and (apparent) fall are symptomatic of a broader trend unfolding across the Davos regimes of the collective West. 

Following the Labour Party’s drubbing in last week’s local elections, Prime Minister Keir Starmer needed to do something big and/or bold to salvage his crumbling “leadership” (for lack of a better word) — something that might have conveyed to his disenchanted voters that their welfare actually mattered. He did neither.

Instead, he brought Harriet Harman back into government as his “adviser on women and girls”. In the 1970s, Harman wrote a paper for the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) defending child pornography. As The Canary notes, “Starmer’s first act of his reshuffle, after months of scandals over his knowing appointment of paedophiles’ pals to senior positions”, was “to appoint a woman linked to a notorious paedophilia advocacy group.”

Starmer’s next move was to bring back former Prime Minister Gordon Brown as the government’s “special envoy on global finance and cooperation”, which, again, was an interesting choice. Besides failing quite abjectly as prime minister (2007-10), Brown is probably best known for two things:

• Selling nearly 400 tonnes of UK gold reserves between 1999 and 2002 at a 20-year market low, in what famously came to be known as the “Brown Bottom“. By announcing the sale in advance, Brown, then chancellor of the exchequer, helped trigger a 10% fall in the market price of gold before a single ounce has been offloaded.
• Helping to unleash the “animal spirits” of financial liberalisation during his tenure as chancellor (1997-2007), only for his tenure as prime minister to be marked by the 2008 crash — a crisis often described as a collapse of those same spirits. That painful history wasn’t enough to prevent Starmer from pledging last year to “bring back the animal spirits of the private sector” by reducing the regulatory burden on businesses.

Starmer’s third move was to try to deliver a skin-saving speech that would, if not inspire the nation, at least put paid to any internal stirrings within his government. But impassioned, inspirational speeches are not exactly Starmer’s forte. As the veteran political analyst Andrew O’Neil noted in the wake of yesterday’s speech, “there’s rarely been a situation so bad that it can’t be made worse with a Keir Starmer speech”:

It certainly wasn’t the Gettysburg Address. But nobody expects that from Keir Starmer. In places it was a familiar walk down memory lane, with the PM bigging up, yet again, his alleged working class credentials. As if we care.

There was plenty of emoting with working people. Though much good it has done them so far. There was a lot of talk of the need for radical change. But no concrete examples of what that would entail. The three policies he announced were simply a rehash of existing policies.

And there were a few outlandish claims, including the assertion that he’d stabilised the economy — and that our economic ‘fundamentals are sound.’  Yes he actually said that.

Normally, when a sitting PM is thumped as badly by the voters as Starmer was on Thursday, they feel the need to say something to the nation.  But Starmer wasn’t speaking to us today. He was speaking to the Labour Party, especially its MPs who hold his fate in their hands.

Hence the Labour crowd-pleasing sections on renationalising British Steel — it’s already under state control —  taking Britain back to the ‘heart of Europe — whatever that means — and more apprenticeships for young folks — already party policy. So far Starmer’s efforts to save his own skin have been a textbook case of how NOT to save your own skin.

I think I’m now at the stage of pitying him.

The silence at the end – where it was obviously assumed there would be hearty applause – is so gloriously cringe-worthy. pic.twitter.com/JVEIwrHeED

— Olly (@oIIyjm) May 11, 2026

At this point, the only thing that could possibly save Starmer’s skin is the absence of a clear successor within the party’s senior ranks. Labour’s neo-Blairite health secretary, Wes Streeting, appears to have already mounted a leadership challenge. But Streeting is even more exposed than Starmer to the Labour Party’s “prince of darkness”, Peter Mandelson, who is now under criminal investigation over his associations with Jeffrey Epstein.

I called for time for serious discussion, no precipitous coup & fully democratic process if leadership election.Instead Wes Streeting has launched coup for fear of a democratic process & whilst candidates are blocked. Handing leadership to Mandelson’s protege is gift to Reform

— John McDonnell (@johnmcdonnellMP) May 12, 2026

Streeting is also about as soulless and characterless as Starmer and is even more craven to corporate interests (see below). Labour’s soft-left members, like John McDonnell, will stop at nothing to prevent a Streeting premiership. If they fail in that task, Streeting’s ascendance would represent the ultimate coup for the Blairite wing of the Labour Party that sabotaged Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership with the bogus charge that Corbyn was anti-Semitic.

As of writing (Monday evening, GMT), the odds of a Streeting challenge appear to be rising.  According to Bloomberg’s Alex Wickham, the prime minister looks in increasing peril as several of Streeting’s allies, including his PPS Joe Morris and constituency neighbour Jas Athwal, have called for Starmer to stand down:

— Labour MPs and aides say developments could now happen quickly if momentum continues to build. A loyalist says it’s now a matter of when not if.

— A Labour official says they believe several Cabinet members are ready to tell the PM he has to set a timetable for his departure if it becomes clear he has lost the authority of the backbenches. They think if the number of public dissenters heads toward three figures that will happen.

— However Cabinet aides insist we are not there yet and they don’t think the whole Cabinet is yet ready to move. One notes that Streeting’s allies appear to have gone after markets closed, after gilts dropped on Monday on the political instability. There will be a lot of attention on market open tomorrow.

— Streeting is silent but there appears to be an orchestrated plot by his supporters to call for Starmer to go so he can move. There was disappointment among some of Streeting’s allies today that he has not moved already but it now feels increasingly inevitable.

Another possible successor is — or at least, was — Manchester City Mayor Andy Burnham, but he would need to become a member of parliament to be able to run as Labour leader. And the Labour Party leadership recently blocked him from being able to stand as a candidate for the by-election in Gorton and Denton. According to Wickham, “Burnham’s allies say he will soon be ready to show he has a route to parliament.”

There’s also the fact that Burnham, who was once a minister under Tony Blair, has already run for the party’s leadership twice before, with underwhelming results. Like Streeting and most other high-ranking party members, he also has close ties to Labour Friends of Israel and other Zionist lobbies.

Your Reminder that Streeting, Burnham. Rayner and Milliband have all been prominent in Labour Friends of Israel and all received donations from the zionist lobby.

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) May 11, 2026

Meanwhile, the party is haemorrhaging support, both to Nigel Farage’s Reform Party on the right and the Green Party on the soft left. This is not a surprise given the scale of Labour’s betrayal to its core voters, beginning with the proposed scrapping of the winter fuel allowance in its first months of power, as well as the authoritarian excesses of Starmer’s rule, writes Yannis Varoufakis:

The crux of their debacle lay, first, in a distinctly dictatorial, authoritarian reflex. And second—crucially—in a seething contempt for those who lent them their votes, while simultaneously performing a grotesque pantomime of flattery toward those who never would, and never will, support them.

Having exorcised from the Labour Party its most authentic voices—people of unimpeachable integrity, such as Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, a purge that eluded even Tony Blair’s repertoire—Starmer embarked on a rampage:

He slashed disability benefits; armed and fed intelligence to the Israeli government as it executed genocide in Gaza; channeled his own inner Farage, perhaps his inner Enoch Powell, to vilify migrants and treat refugees as vermin; gutted international aid to masquerade as a defender of defence spending; bulldozed wildlife and their habitats; unveiled a new lexicon of draconian anti-protest laws; left trans people suspended in legal limbo; clung with religious fervour to absurd, socially ruinous fiscal rules; allowed Rachel Reeves to squander £100 billion covering the Bank of England’s outrageous and wholly unnecessary Quantitative Tightening losses—a gift that keeps giving to the City’s banks—while imposing yet another round of austerity on government departments and public services.

Once the great hope of the downtrodden, Starmer’s Labour has become the villain – the genuinely nasty party. Once a human rights lawyer, he has single-handedly plunged Britain into a shoddy, incompetent authoritarianism.

We have covered that creeping authoritarianism in some depth in our two-instalment post, “Just How Dystopian Can Starmer’s Britain Become?” (here and here). Indeed, arguably Starmer’s most important legacy is the way he has instrumentalised the law, particularly the anti-terrorism laws, to arrest and intimidate pro-Palestinian journalists, activists and protesters.

With ruthless zeal, his government has criminalised public opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza while lending support to the furtherance of said genocide, including through the provision of more than 100 RAF spy flights over Gaza. In Starmer’s Britain, merely expressing critical views about the political ideology of Zionism in a private conversation can get you arrested…

If you, in a private conversation on a train in the UK, express criticism of Zionism, British police will hunt you down to arrest you.#priorities https://t.co/e7wq1kqzNN

— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) May 10, 2026

Even before his election as prime minister, in July 2024, Starmer had shown his true colours on the Israel/Palestine question. Starmer had already played an important role in bringing down his former, pro-Palestine boss, Jeremy Corbyn. On October 11, 2023, Starmer, then leader of the opposition, told LBC that Israel had the right to collectively punish Gaza, including by cutting off water and power to the enclave, in response to Hamas’ Oct 7 attacks.

11th Oct’23

Starmer on the siege of Gaza 🇵🇸

“Israel 🇮🇱 does have that right” to cut off water & power from Gaza 🇵🇸

He gave support to 🇮🇱 to bomb and starve children

He partnered with Netanyahu 🇮🇱

Never let anyone forget

Starmer is not a ‘decent man’pic.twitter.com/MHyEsuE5dw

— Howard Beckett (@BeckettUnite) February 10, 2026

Following Corbyn’s demise, Starmer began the task of purging the Labour Party of any remaining left-wing thinkers. It is a task he may well have been assigned by the Trilateral Commission, a trans-Atlantic forum set up by US billionaire David Rockefeller in the 1970s to help steer Western democracies by prioritising corporate interests over those of labour. According to Matt Kennard, Starmer was the first ever sitting British member of parliament to join the Commission, which he did behind Corbyn’s back.

Starmer’s job was to extinguish socialist left organising in Labour, to block any future prospect of a left fightback, to ensure there could be no socialist left leader in the near future & to create distance from the trade union movement- irrespective of the electoral…

— Laura Pidcock (@LauraPidcock) May 11, 2026

Since Starmer’s election in July 2024, the Blairite faction of the Labour Party has wielded enormous influence over government, both through the appointment of Blair acolytes like Streeting and Peter Kyle, the science secretary, and through Blair’s think tank, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), as we warned in our our May 3, 2024 post, Tony Blair and His Associates Are Waiting in the Wings to Take Back Power in UK:

One of the great contradictions of British political life over the past 15 years is Sir Tony Blair. The three-term prime minister is broadly reviled by the British public, even among many Labour Party voters, yet he continues to be feted and fawned over by the British establishment and media. Even after the “crushing verdict” (in The Guardian‘s words) of the Chilcott Inquiry — that the Blair government’s case for the Iraq war was “deficient” — was finally made public in 2016, Blair remained a go-to person for the British and international media on all manner of topics, particularly the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is a very different story for the British public. In a recent YouGov opinion poll, only 22% of respondents said Blair had had a positive effect on the Labour Party, with 38% saying his impact was broadly negative. Even among Labour Party voters, only 26% labelled his impact as positive compared to 38% who saw it as negative. According to another YouGov survey, this time from 2022, a mere 14% approved of his knighthood and only 3% strongly so, while 63% disapproved, 41% strongly so. Over a million people signed a petition demanding the knighthood be revoked.

In other words, the last thing most people in the UK want to see is Blair making a political comeback. Yet the former PM is closer than ever to regaining political power, albeit through a proxy Labour Party government led by the current party leader, Keir Starmer, who is hotly tipped to win the next general election… Starmer is favourite to win not because of a groundswell of support for his vision or candidacy — the UK public view the party under Starmer even less favourably than under Ed Miliband — but because support for the governing (if you can call it that) Conservative Party is in freefall…

As the FT reported in 2023, TBI has in effect become a global consultancy to the UK government, giving advice on a whole host of issues. It has over $100 million and is currently active in 40 other countries, including the United States. Most, however, are in the global south/majority, where TBI advises governments on DPI such as digital vaccine certificates, digital identity and central bank digital currency.

Since coming to power, Starmer’s government has prioritised the digital authoritarian solutions peddled by TBI, such as digital identity; the mass sharing of the UK’s digital health data, which would hugely benefit TBI’s main paymaster, Larry Ellison; and the nationwide deployment of facial recognition cameras, a project that was begun by the Conservatives but has been massively expanded by Starmer.

Blair’s latest grand proposal for the people of Britain is to scrap the state pension’s triple lock, which will help further impoverish struggling pensioners…

Once again, Tony Blair is wrong and advocates to make ordinary people worse off.
Britain has one of the lowest effective state pension entitlements in the whole of Europe.

Tony Blair’s thinktank urges scrapping of state pension triple-lockhttps://t.co/ipQ9PuGNUl

— Diane Abbott (@HackneyAbbott) May 1, 2026

A Streeting government would further intensify these trends. As an FT exposé revealed just yesterday, the Streeting-run NHS England has granted external staff from companies including Palantir “unlimited access” to identifiable patient data. This is in direct contradiction to NHS England’s previous claims about Palantir’s management of the NHS’ federated data platform, in which all keys and data, they said, would stay under NHS control.

FT Exclusive: NHS England has granted external staff from companies including Palantir “unlimited access” to identifiable patient data while working on a part of its flagship data platform. https://t.co/sxgWCuZua6 pic.twitter.com/qR7JogFhxw

— Financial Times (@FT) May 11, 2026

It’s still unclear whether Starmer will see out this crisis, though the current signs are far from encouraging. If he doesn’t, the UK will soon have its seventh government since the Brexit referendum 10 years ago. As The Times’ Matthew Syed notes, the next leader, whoever he or she is, “will be subject to instant leadership speculation and the next, and the next, whether Labour, Reform or Tory. Britain is becoming ungovernable.”

As political instability in the country rises, one can’t help but wonder to what extent it will affect the country’s economic stability. With unemployment already close to COVID-era highs and 10-year gilts topping 5% in recent days and 30-year gilts just hitting a 28-year high, the warning signs are already flashing.

Some may feel I’m dwelling on this, but I am concerned for the health of the UK economy.
The yield on the 10-year gilt has climbed 12 basis points today (see the CNBC chart below), decoupling from both oil prices and yields in other advanced economies—both of which are currently… pic.twitter.com/38rAwIc0uX

— Mohamed A. El-Erian (@elerianm) May 5, 2026

Ultimately, what is happening in the UK — the rapid rise and fall of mediocre leaders, the degradation of living standards, the unquestioning support for Israel, even as it commits two genocides, the inability to find a new place in the emerging multipolar world, and the rapid roll out of digital surveillance and control systems — is symptomatic of a broader trend affecting the “Davos Regime” across the collective West, as Armchair Warrior noted in a tweet yesterday:

We’ve actually seen this for years now in the West, electoral cycle after electoral cycle. Party A takes a certain paraliberal policy course – let’s call it the Universal Davos Policy – that heavily favors special interests and globalism, and which is wildly unpopular with citizens because it necessarily entails continued degradation of Western standards of living (via self-destructive economics from war and/or green policy) and cultural cohesion (via mass migration and official woke nihilism). Party B then campaigns against this state of affairs, scores a massive win in a protest vote, and continues the Universal Davos Policy unchanged, sneering all the while at anyone who suggests they should actually fulfill the campaign promises that got them into power. Party A then takes advantage of voters’ short memories to get back into power on another landslide protest vote, or in more fractured political systems Party C wins the protest vote… and they continue the Universal Davos Policy unchanged.

Thus we have constant political churn in the West, with political blocs switching off essentially every election – and no policy turbulence at all because the entire political establishment is a wholly owned subsidiary of Davos and ignores voters to do their bidding on ALL substantive policy issues. Anti-Davos political forces are ruthlessly branded as extremists, coopted to promote the Universal Davos Policy should they assume power, or even criminalized and destroyed. Democracy itself is no object, as elections have begun being cancelled and openly rigged in the West when the wrong person could possibly win.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has become an active combatant in the Iran war, according to fresh reporting in The Wall Street Journal.

Last week saw the US-Iran ceasefire briefly break down, during which time the US struck some Iranian coastal sites and the Iranians sent drones and missiles on several Gulf states once again. Iran also reportedly tried to attack three American warships carrying out Trump’s ‘Project Freedom’ operations.

But even before this, during the intense missile exchanges of early April (before the ceasefire), the UAE also ‘secretly’ attacked Iran: “The United Arab Emirates has carried out military strikes on Iran, people familiar with the matter said, casting the Gulf monarchy as an active combatant in a war in which it has been Iran’s biggest target,” WSJ writes.

As for whether the UAE was active in hitting Iran last week, this remains unknown. There’s much that may yet be revealed in the future, amid the current fog of war.

At this moment, however, the UAE has yet to publicly disclose these prior alleged offensive attacks on the Islamic Republic. But WSJ reports:

The strikes, which the U.A.E. hasn’t publicly acknowledged, have included an attack on a refinery on Iran’s Lavan Island in the Persian Gulf, the people familiar with the matter said. That attack took place in early April around the time President Trump was announcing a cease-fire in the war after a five-week air campaign and sparked a large fire and knocked much of its capacity off line for months.

Disclosures of sites that came under attack from the Iranian side are consistent with this reporting, however. “Iran said at the time that the refinery had been struck in an enemy attack and launched a barrage of missile and drone strikes against the U.A.E. and Kuwait in response,” continues WSJ.

The publication further says Washington issued no objection upon the UAE’s getting directly involved. In fact, US officials have been calling on regional allies to step up to the fight, so the United States is not shouldering the burden alone.

By and large the Gulf allies relied solely on the US and Israel to pummel Iran during the prior 38 days of heavy bombing which marked the peak of Operation Epic Fury.

This as the Gulf absorbed the bulk of Iran’s retaliation. Iran sent hundreds if not thousands of ballistic missiles and drones on Gulf energy, infrastructure, and even central areas of cities.

Prior online open-source murmurings turning out true…

BREAKING: 🇦🇪🇮🇷 Iranian military sources claim UAE Mirage-2000‑9 jets were involved in an attack on the Lavan Island refinery today.

Reports say the U.S. informed Iran that the strikes were not linked to the U.S. or Israel. pic.twitter.com/8gnfYjt5kq

— War Radar (@War_Radar2) April 8, 2026

Iranian officials declared they were primarily targeting US assets and military bases, and further vowed to ‘punish’ these countries for ever hosting American bases in the first place.

The UAE in effect joining the US military campaign marks yet another escalation. If the Saudis join too then the potential for further runaway escalation only grows. The ceasefire meanwhile seems effectively dead at this stage.

Authored by Dorothy Li via The Epoch Times,

The British Foreign Ministry on May 9 stated that it had summoned the Chinese ambassador after a London court convicted two men, including a former British immigration officer, of spying for the Chinese communist regime.

Bill Yuen Chung Biu (L) and Peter Wai Chi Leung (R), both charged with assisting Hong Kong intelligence service, arrive separately ahead of their trial at the Old Bailey in central London, on March 2, 2026. Carlos Jasso/AFP via Getty Images

The Chinese ambassador, Zheng Zeguang, was called to the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office on May 8 for an official reprimand, according to a British government statement.

The UK Foreign Office stated that it had made clear that “any attempts by foreign states to intimidate, harass or harm individuals or communities” on British soil will not be tolerated and that such activities constitute “a serious breach of the UK’s sovereignty.”

“We will continue to use the full range of tools available to protect our security and hold China to account for actions which undermine our safety and democratic values,” it stated.

The British government’s move came just a day after a jury found Wai Chi-leung and Yuen Chung-biu guilty under the National Security Act 2023 of assisting a foreign intelligence service, following a weeks-long trial at the Central Criminal Court in London.

Wai was also convicted of misconduct in a public office in relation to misusing the UK Interior Ministry’s systems to track targets while working for the British Border Force at London Heathrow airport. Prosecutors said Wai used his access to the UK government’s databases to conduct unauthorized searches while off duty and improperly shared the personal information obtained.

Helen Flanagan, head of counterterrorism policing in London, which led the investigation into the high-profile case, called the pair’s activists “both sinister and chilling.”

“Our investigation found they were spying for the Hong Kong authorities, targeting UK-based pro-democracy campaigners,” Flanagan said in a May 7 statement following the conviction.

The pair—both dual Chinese and British nationals—were described by local media as the first in UK history to be convicted of spying for Beijing. They face up to 14 years in prison.

The Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in London on July 21, 2020. Luke Dray/Getty Images

Investigators found that Yuen was in contact with individuals linked to the Hong Kong government while working at the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office (HKETO) in London. He then tasked Wai with conducting spying and surveillance of Hong Kong pro-democracy activists living in Britain.

Messages on Yuen’s phone indicated that their surveillance of Nathan Law, a former Hong Kong lawmaker and a prominent pro-democracy advocate, had begun as early as 2021, according to prosecutors.

The Chinese Embassy in the UK confirmed its ambassador met with a British Foreign Office official on May 8. According to a Chinese summary of the meeting, Zheng protested the London court’s ruling and called on the UK side to stop what he called “anti-China political manipulation.”

The case has cast a renewed spotlight on HKETO, a Hong Kong government overseas outpost that was designed to promote trade relations between the UK and the Asian financial hub. Critics have long argued that its resources and privileges were used for intelligence gathering and targeting overseas Hong Kong activists.

In response to the May 7 ruling, the London-based Hong Kong Labor Rights Monitor called on the UK government to urgently review the status and privileges granted to HKETO, including whether its current diplomatic privileges remain appropriate.

“We cannot allow the Hong Kong authorities to disguise political repression as trade promotion, nor permit authoritarian ‘long-arm repression’ to extend into free societies,” the group said in a May 7 statement.

The establishment media has been drumming up fear after a recent outbreak of Hantavirus on a cruise liner traveling from Argentina to West Africa.  The Guardian has used the opportunity to assert that the US is currently ill equipped to deal with future pandemic threats, largely because of Donald Trump (of course) and the dramatic US exit from the now disgraced World Health Organization. 

Is Hantavirus a serious danger to the world, or, is it another hyped up virus like Covid being used to trigger public hysteria?  And if it is being hyped, who (or WHO) stands to benefit? 

For decades the WHO constructed its image as a global angel of benevolence; the primary line of defense against what they said was the inevitable invasion of a population rending plague.  However, when the time finally came in the form of a mutated Coronavirus (Covid), they dropped the ball, and evidence suggests they may have done it deliberately.

During the initial outbreak in China, the WHO echoed CCP propaganda suggesting that human-to-human contact was unlikely and, knowingly or unknowingly, aided China in hiding details behind the outbreak.  Details surrounding the involvement of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the largest dangerous disease lab in Asia, were actively dismissed (or suppressed).  Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus even praised China’s “transparency”. 

The WHO then set up a joint task force to determine the origins of Covid, only to let the Chinese dominate the investigation and lead it away from the activities at the Level 4 lab in Wuhan.  The Chinese wanted to push the theory of animal-to-animal mutation instead of the gain of function research that was ongoing at the lab (partially funded by US interests in the Obama Administration). 

Today, evidence overwhelmingly suggests that Covid originated in the Wuhan Lab.  In January 2025, the CIA assessed that a lab-related origin is more likely than natural spillover.  This determination matched with similar FBI assessments. 

In 2025, German Intelligence also reported their findings, indicating a 90% likelihood that Covid was engineered and originated at the Wuhan Lab in China.   

Of course, anyone who made this claim online during the pandemic response was called a dangerous “conspiracy theorist” and was deplatformed (much like Zero Hedge).

The WHO would go on to exaggerate the death rate of the virus, claiming an initial Case Fatality Rate (CFR) of 3.4%.  This data was based on studies which ignored mild cases as well as asymptomatic cases, thus artificially pumping up the death rate.    

Dozens of studies as early as May 2020 showed that the median Infection Fatality Rate (a more accurate number) was only 0.27% (later adjusted to 0.23%).  The WHO continued to spread disinformation and hysteria surrounding covid while ignoring the true IFR data.  That is to say, all the lockdowns, the mandates, the social media censorship, the arrests, the push for vaccine passports, etc. – all of it was over a virus that 99.8% of the population would easily survive. 

The WHO has been exposed as a perpetrator of pandemic disinformation and is no longer trusted by the public.  The US under the Trump Administration has exited the organization on these grounds, and as a result the WHO has lost at least 20% of its total funding.  It is now facing dire financial conditions.  In response, the UN and the establishment media have been running a spin campaign to present the WHO as indispensable.  

It is therefore not surprising that the WHO and the media are suddenly jumping on the cruise line Hantavirus story as if it is significant, while at the same time arguing that Trump is putting the public at risk by not participating in the WHO’s antics.  They need the money badly, and so they’ve decided to remind the public why we should be afraid. 

For those who are unaware, Hantavirus is a common virus around the world and in the US.  Estimates show around 100,000 cases of the disease occur annually.  In 2023, there were 40 cases in the US.  The virus is most often contracted when humans are exposed to dried rodent feces and urine, floating as particulates in the air which are then inhaled into the lungs. 

The spread from human to human is rare and only occurs with the South American strain.  Contraction is difficult, with the virus passing from one person to another through “prolonged contact with bodily fluids”.  It makes you wonder what kind of pleasure cruise these people were on when the most recent outbreak started?  The point is, the story is being inflated from a normal event into a crisis event.  

This is probably why the Spanish Government set up an elaborate bus transfer of supposedly highly infectious cruise passengers, only to drop off a psychiatrist with the Ministry of Health down the road without protective gear like he’s going home after school. 

Las imágenes que está dejando toda la “Operación Hantavirus” son de película de Berlanga.

Contagiados quitándose la mascarilla, personal bajando de los autobuses con el EPI en la mano, otros que ni lo llevan puesto, etc.

Menudo cachondeo.pic.twitter.com/bYo01wA2RN pic.twitter.com/kiBnBAiBp0

— Elyon (@ElyonMan) May 10, 2026

The bottom line?  Hantavirus is all over the world and it’s not a threat to the vast majority of people.  The artificial media panic and the opportunism of the WHO may be an effort to test the waters for another fraudulent pandemic scare, but the majority of the propaganda seems to be aimed at restoring the WHO’s reputation and saving it from financial ruin.