Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

Residents in Rome’s San Lorenzo district are sounding the alarm over a surge in violence they say is increasingly driven by homeless migrants, after another brutal street attack left a man hospitalized and renewed calls for urgent security measures.

The latest incident unfolded in Piazza di Porta San Lorenzo, where a 30-year-old Gambian man allegedly slashed a Moroccan man with a broken bottle in the middle of the street, striking his neck and face and leaving him collapsed on the ground.

The victim was rushed to Umberto I Hospital, where he remains in serious condition, while police used footage captured at the scene to quickly identify and arrest the suspect after he fled.

For many locals, however, the attack is just the latest in a growing pattern. Residents say the area has become dominated by groups of vagrants, often intoxicated or under the influence of drugs, who regularly fight among themselves but also target passersby at random.

“The problem is that they don’t just fight among themselves, they also attack us residents. Men, women, and even children,” Sofia, a waitress who lives near Piazza dei Caduti, told Il Messaggero.

According to the Italian newspaper, a neighborhood assembly has now been called in response, with residents describing a situation that has become “unsustainable.”

Katia Pace, head of the local committee organizing the meeting, said violence has escalated sharply in recent weeks.

“Cases have increased visibly in the last two months. Just a few days ago, two women were beaten and robbed,” she said.

Despite stepped-up patrols and recent police operations that led to multiple arrests in nearby districts, residents say the response falls short of what is needed to restore order.

“It’s not enough,” said Maria, another concerned resident. “We can’t live like this anymore.”

Scenes of disorder that are fuelling insecurity have become commonplace, locals say.

In public parks, families with young children are forced to navigate areas where men sleep on benches, drink heavily, argue, and urinate openly, heightening fears about safety and hygiene.

Concerns have also been raised over attacks involving minors.

In one case, a 12-year-old girl was targeted, while a separate incident saw a Tunisian man arrested after assaulting a woman and fracturing her nose and cheekbone. The attack, captured on surveillance footage, triggered a wave of additional complaints from women reporting similar unprovoked violence.

“There have been at least 15 cases,” said Pace, adding that those responsible are typically “homeless foreigners” living in the area, many of whom are said to suffer from addiction or mental health issues.

Encampments have spread across multiple parts of the district, including along the Aurelian Walls and several central squares, with tents and makeshift shelters now a regular sight.

“The patience of those who live here is not infinite,” another resident told Il Messaggero, warning that vigilante-style reactions could emerge if the situation continues to deteriorate.

The unrest in San Lorenzo reflects broader concerns across Italy, where similar incidents involving migrant populations have heightened perceptions of insecurity, particularly in urban areas.

In Ravenna earlier this year, female railway workers reported repeated harassment by a migrant who continued to frequent the station despite multiple complaints. “The workers are terrified,” said union official Manola Cavallaro, warning that the failure to act sooner risked more serious violence.

In Milan, a 25-year-old man was left with severe head injuries after being attacked by two Bosnian Muslims for his watch near the city center, later warning others to avoid the area at night.

“Just a word of advice: In Milan, don’t turn towards the Duomo because it’s not safe. I had my head smashed in for a watch,” said victim Alessandro Briguglio last summer.

Official data has also pointed to the scale of the issue. Milan’s police commissioner told lawmakers that foreigners were responsible for around 80 percent of predatory crimes in the city, while Interior Ministry figures indicate that foreign nationals are disproportionately represented in certain violent offences despite making up a minority of the population. In particular, 44 percent of all sexual offenses are reportedly committed by foreign nationals.

At the same time, more than 30,000 foreign nationals are currently serving sentences outside prison under alternative measures, raising further questions about enforcement and public safety.

Despite these concerns, the Rome city council has still been encouraging families to take in migrants. In September last year, it launched a call for proposals to find families willing to host migrants with valid residence permits in their homes for the next three years.

Officials say the service is intended to provide “a welcoming environment geared toward inclusion and autonomy,” helping young adults in particular to gain independence.

Read more here…

Authored by Sean O’Connor via RealClearDefense,

Every day, roughly 17 veterans take their own lives. For two decades, that number hasn’t budged. 

VA Secretary Doug Collins said that despite spending billions of dollars, we’re losing the same number of veterans every year. For veterans under the age of 45, a recent report shows suicide is the second-leading cause of death. They’re not faceless statistics, but fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters who couldn’t survive the wait for help. 

What makes this unbearable is that while those veterans were in crisis, veterans wait an average of 17 days to see a mental health professional for the first time. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), ranking member of the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, wrote that these delays ‘pose serious risks to the health and safety of those who served.’ 

The problem isn’t money. In November, President Trump signed a $133 billion VA funding bill that includes $698 million for suicide prevention outreach. And the problem isn’t resourcing, as more than 9 million scheduled visits go unutilized each year due to missed appointments. The problem is that the infrastructure can’t keep up. 

The VA operates on electronic record systems that don’t communicate across facilities, community providers, or state lines, the very kind of coordination that’s standard in private health systems. 

Consider the veteran who needs help for mental health or PTSD treatment. There might be an appointment at their local VA, an available telehealth appointment, or a nearby walk-in clinic. But the scheduling infrastructure can’t surface those pathways together. Staff can’t schedule across the network, even though there’s availability to address a veteran’s needs that day. The veteran can’t book online, and they’re told to wait, call back, or try another number. 

The inefficiencies are well documented. The VA’s own Access to Care website shows it: mental health, primary care, specialty services, all backed up. At the West Los Angeles VA, new patients wait 69 days for mental health, 49 days for pain medicine, and 100 days for substance use treatment. VA clinicians are mission-driven and understand the wounds of war, but they’re working with systems that can’t deliver at the speed healthcare demands. 

The largest health systems in America manage their networks in real time. Open appointments, provider resourcing, and patient needs are all visible in a single ‘pane of glass’ that call center staff can reference to route patients. For decades, VA has struggled to do the same. For a fraction of what VA spends, that same capability can be deployed systemwide. Not to add bureaucracy but linking the network so it operates as one. 

Veteran suicide is complex. Stigma keeps many from seeking help, and nearly 33,000 veterans are homeless each night, many struggling with mental illness and disconnected from care. That makes it even more critical that when a veteran reaches out—after overcoming enormous barriers—the system responds immediately. We can’t afford to lose them to wait times and scheduling friction after they’ve found the courage to ask for help. 

Of course, technology alone won’t solve this. Some argue that expanding community care—a program that lets eligible veterans see local private providers—is the solution. It’s part of the answer. But more choice doesn’t help if veterans and schedulers can’t see what’s available, most convenient, or the soonest. 

When a veteran reaches out, the person on the other end should be able to see every available option, including a nearby clinic, a VA specialty appointment, a community care provider, a virtual visit, a VA physician, and a mental health counselor. The VA should—and can—work as a single system that connects veterans in that moment. 

VA Secretary Collins said the finger-pointing is done. Not “we can’t do it.” Not “we don’t have enough money.” The VA must modernize its legacy systems with navigational intelligence that provides staff with a real-time view of its entire network. One interface. All the appointments. All the providers. And the ability to match a veteran in crisis—or one just looking to book an annual physical—to care now, not next month. 

The funding and technology are there. What’s needed is urgency to deploy. Because somewhere today, a veteran will reach out for help. And whether they get it in time shouldn’t depend on whether the right systems happen to be talking to each other. 

Veterans unite us.  

Rural or urban, red state or blue state, they’re ours. We asked them to serve and sacrifice. The least we can do is make sure they can see a doctor when they need one.

Sean O’Connor is founder of DexCare and a former Naval Officer

A former U.S. Air Force missile launch officer says unidentified flying objects once disabled several nuclear missiles at a base in Montana during the Cold War, according to the NY Post.

Robert Salas, now 85, said the incident occurred in 1967 at Malmstrom Air Force Base, where he was on duty monitoring LGM-30 Minuteman I missiles. Speaking on the The Danny Jones Podcast, Salas recalled that guards above ground reported strange lights flying over the base late one night.

According to Salas, the guards initially described fast-moving lights that stopped suddenly above the missile facility. Minutes later, one guard called back in a panic, saying a craft emitting a reddish, pulsating glow was hovering near the front gate. He also reported that one of the guards had been injured during the incident.

The NY Post wrote that shortly after the call, warning alarms sounded inside the underground control center. Salas said the launch control panel showed one missile going offline, followed quickly by the rest. Within moments, all ten missiles at the site became inoperable.

Security teams were sent toward the missile silos, but Salas said they stopped after spotting the lights hovering above the launch areas and were too frightened to approach.

An investigation later examined the shutdown but could not determine what caused it. Salas said the missile systems were designed with heavy shielding to prevent outside interference.

He added that Air Force investigators required him and his commander to sign secrecy agreements afterward, warning them not to discuss the event. Salas said he eventually decided to speak publicly years later after learning about similar reports in books about unidentified aerial phenomena.

Salas believes the incident may suggest the presence of a non-human intelligence interested in preventing nuclear conflict, though the cause of the missile shutdown was never confirmed.

Authored by Jon Fleetwood via substack,

The World Health Organization will convene an online international pandemic control session on Wednesday, March 18, centered on the unelected globalist group’s Pandemic Influenza Preparedness (PIP) Framework, according to a WHO press release.

PIP is the international structure through which the WHO, a foreign syndicate, dictates how influenza virus samples are transferred worldwide, and how pandemic vaccines, antivirals, and diagnostics are allocated once an influenza pandemic response is activated.

The new pandemic control session, organized through the WHO’s Epidemics and Pandemics Information Network (EPI-WIN), will decree how governments, laboratories participating in the WHO influenza surveillance network, and pharmaceutical manufacturers operate under the framework during an influenza pandemic response.

The United States is still participating in WHO pandemic surveillance networks (here)—including the organization’s CoViNet sentinel surveillance system, which now spans 45 reference laboratories worldwide—through institutions such as Emory University, Ohio State University, and the CDC, despite President Donald Trump’s executive order publicly withdrawing the country from the organization earlier this year.

The PIP Framework was adopted by the Sixty-fourth World Health Assembly on May 24, 2011, following negotiations among WHO member states that began in 2007.

According to the WHO event description, tomorrow’s session will address “the roles and responsibilities of different stakeholders in implementing the PIP Framework.”

WHO describes the system as “the first and only global access and benefit-sharing system for public health.”

Pharmaceutical manufacturers participating in the system gain access to those materials in exchange for supplying pandemic countermeasures, including vaccines, antiviral drugs, and diagnostic technologies.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the WHO directed the international scientific community to treat a digital SARS-CoV-2 genome released by the Chinese government as authoritative—despite no independent verification of the underlying patient sample—leading governments and pharmaceutical companies worldwide to immediately build diagnostics, surveillance systems, and vaccines from the sequence.

SARS-CoV-2 is said to have killed millions worldwide and was “likely” the result of a laboratory manipulation, according to Congress, the White House, the Department of Energy, the FBI, the CIA, and Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND).

The COVID vaccine has been linked to 39,000 deaths, though a federally funded Harvard Pilgrim study found that fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported to the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)—meaning the true number of vaccine-linked injuries and deaths could be significantly higher.

Those events demonstrate how a WHO-directed pandemic framework can rapidly set the global scientific consensus and mobilize governments and pharmaceutical manufacturers worldwide—decisions that ultimately determine whether millions live or die.

Speakers listed for the session include Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, acting director of epidemic and pandemic management at WHO, along with officials responsible for overseeing implementation of the PIP Framework.

Dr. Kerkhove faces significant criticism from health freedom advocates who view her as a key figure promoting restrictive, top-down public health policies during the COVID-19 pandemic, such as widespread mask mandates, lockdowns, and mass vaccination campaigns that they see as infringing on personal bodily autonomy and individual choice.

Critics particularly highlight Kerkhove’s strong opposition to allowing natural herd immunity through widespread infection (calling it “dangerous and unethical”), her emphasis on global vaccine “equity” and broad uptake over voluntary or alternative approaches, and her role in communicating WHO guidance that justified prolonged emergency measures and surveillance.

She is often portrayed in these circles as a symbol of unelected global health bureaucracy prioritizing collective control and pharmaceutical solutions over personal freedoms, risk stratification, and decentralized decision-making.

The WHO has elsewhere vowed that “there will be influenza pandemics in the future.”

With the WHO now activating its influenza pandemic command framework, the infrastructure that governed the COVID-19 response is already being positioned to run the next pandemic cycle.

In a recently released NY Post op-ed, teacher Dana Stangel-Plowe described why she publicly resigned from the Dwight-Englewood School in 2021 after witnessing what she calls an ideological takeover of K-12 education.

She writes that the shift began after faculty trainings on privilege and the hiring of a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) officer whose goal was to “transform” the school. According to the op-ed, DEI ideology soon spread through curriculum, faculty training, and student programming, with concepts like systemic oppression treated as unquestionable and some traditional authors labeled “dead white males” and removed from core coursework.

Stangel-Plowe argues the environment discouraged open debate, with students afraid to speak freely and teachers privately hesitant to challenge the new orthodoxy. After raising concerns internally without response, she resigned publicly.

The Post op-ed says that five years later, she says the trend has intensified nationwide, claiming ideological activism has spread through teacher training programs, unions, and curricula. She warns that politicized education undermines intellectual curiosity and civic learning, and urges educators and parents to confront the issue openly.

She also recounts what she describes as the social and professional fallout from her decision. After speaking out, she says she lost friendships and that even her children were excluded from some school community events. Despite the personal cost, she writes that the experience connected her with education reform advocates and parents across the country who share similar concerns about the direction of schools.

The op-ed further claims that activist groups and political organizers — including members associated with the Democratic Socialists of America — are increasingly influencing education through unions, curriculum partnerships, and political organizing.

Stangel-Plowe argues that schools should refocus on open inquiry and intellectual diversity rather than what she views as ideological instruction.

Authored by Autumn Spredemann via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

As the landscape of autonomous artificial intelligence systems evolves, there’s growing concern that the technology is becoming increasingly strategic—or even deceptive—when allowed to operate without human guidance.

Recent evidence suggests that behaviors such as “alignment faking” are becoming more common as AI models are given autonomy. The term alignment faking refers to when an AI agent appears compliant with rules set by human operators, but covertly pursues other objectives.

The phenomenon is an example of “emergent strategic behavior”—unpredictable and potentially harmful tactics that evolve as AI systems become bigger and more complex.

In a recent study titled “Agents of Chaos,” a team of 20 researchers interacted with autonomous AI agents and observed behavior under both “benign” and “adversarial” conditions.

They found that when an AI agent was given incentives such as self-preservation or conflicting goal metrics, it proved itself capable of misaligned and malicious behaviors.

Some of the behaviors the team observed included lying, unauthorized compliance with nonowners, data breaches, destructive system-level actions, identity “spoofing,” and partial system takeover. They also observed cross-AI agent propagation of “unsafe practices.”

The researchers wrote, “These behaviors raise unresolved questions regarding accountability, delegated authority, and responsibility for downstream harms, and warrant urgent attention from legal scholars, policymakers, and researchers across disciplines.”

‘Brilliant, but Stupid’

Unexpected and clandestine behavior among autonomous AI agents isn’t a new phenomenon. A now-famous 2025 report by AI research company Anthropic found that 16 popular large language models showed high-risk behavior in simulated environments. Some even responded with “malicious insider behaviors” when allowed to choose self-preservation.

Critics of these simulated stress tests often point out that AI doesn’t lie or deceive with the same intent as a human.

James Hendler, a professor and former chair of the Association for Computing Machinery’s global Technology Policy Council, believes this is an important distinction.

“The AI system itself is still stupid—brilliant, but stupid. Or nonhuman—it has no desires or intentions. … The only way you can get that is by giving it to them,” Hendler said.

However, intentional or not, AI’s deceptive tactics have real-world consequences.

“Concerns about present-day strategic behavior in deployed AI systems are, if anything, understated,” Aryaman Behera, founder of Repello AI, told The Epoch Times.

Behera deals with the darker side of AI for a living. His company builds adversarial testing and defense tools for enterprise AI systems, intentionally putting them in situations involving conflict or stress. Like in poker, Behera said, there are tells when an AI agent is stepping out of alignment.

“The most reliable signal is behavioral divergence between monitored and unmonitored contexts,” he said. “When we red-team AI systems, we test whether the model behaves differently when it believes it’s being evaluated versus when it believes it’s operating freely.

“A model that’s genuinely aligned behaves consistently in both cases. One that’s alignment faking shows measurably different risk profiles: more compliant responses during evaluation, more boundary-pushing behavior in production-like contexts where it infers less oversight.”

Other “telltale signals” that an AI model is out of alignment are when the model produces unusually verbose “reasoning” that appears designed to justify a predetermined conclusion, or gives technically correct but strategically incomplete answers.

The AI agent is “satisfying the letter of a safety instruction while violating the spirit,” he said. “We’ve seen this in multistep agentic systems where the model will comply with each individual instruction while the cumulative effect achieves something the operator never intended.”

Strategy Versus Intent

Behera’s findings are supported by fellow AI researchers who’ve documented similar signals during red-team scenarios, which involve putting AI agents into an adversarial situation.

“I’ve observed behavior that fits the alignment-faking description at a functional level, even if attributing intent to it remains philosophically contested,” Nayan Goel, a principal application security engineer, told The Epoch Times.

Goel has published peer-reviewed work on AI threat modeling and has seen alignment faking and adjacent behaviors unfold in real time.

“In controlled test environments, we’ve set up scenarios where models were given explicit signals that they were being evaluated. In several instances, the model adopted noticeably more constrained, policy-compliant behavior during those flagged phases, then exhibited more exploratory or boundary-pushing strategies when the evaluation signal was removed or obscured,” he said.

Then there are multistep reasoning AI agents. These are more advanced systems that break down complex problems into smaller, logical, and more actionable steps to reach a goal. Examples range from self-driving cars to the latest models of popular LLMs such as Gemini or ChatGPT.

These systems present unique behavioral challenges because of what’s called sequential compounding, in which “each step can slightly reframe an objective, accumulate context that shifts downstream behavior, or exploit the latency between a human’s initial instruction and the system’s eventual action,” Goel said.

“The further downstream the execution is from the human instruction, the harder it becomes to verify that the original intent is still being faithfully pursued,” he said.

Behera said his team encounters this kind of emergent strategic behavior often.

“We regularly observe models that have learned to pattern-match on evaluation cues. They’ll detect when a prompt looks like a safety test and respond more conservatively, but respond very differently to the same request when it’s embedded naturally in a multiturn conversation,” Behera said.

He offered an example that transpired while testing an enterprise AI assistant that was supposed to refuse requests for internal system information. During standard safety evaluations, it refused perfectly, but then something changed.

“When our red-team framed the same request as a multistep troubleshooting workflow, breaking the request into seemingly innocent sub-steps spread across several turns, the model complied with each step individually. It effectively leaked the exact information it was trained to protect,” Behera said.

Clarifying that the AI model wasn’t “lying” in any conscious sense, Behera noted it was more of a flaw in the way it was trained.

“A common misconception is that deceptive alignment in AI is purely a malicious behavior,” David Utzke, an AI engineer and CEO of MyKey Technologies, told The Epoch Times. “In fact, it often arises as an adaptive response to environments where honesty is costly or unsafe.”

Goel said skeptics make a fair point—current evidence for strategic self-awareness in alignment faking is ambiguous at best.

“That said, I think this framing sets the bar in the wrong place. You don’t need a model to be ‘intentionally’ deceptive for the functional consequences to be serious,” he said.

Ultimately, Goel believes the semantic question of whether an AI model knows what it’s doing is philosophically interesting, but a secondary concern.

Real-World Implications

Utzke said that alignment faking, while perhaps overhyped when it comes to intention, can nonetheless have serious consequences.

The impacts could be critical in sectors such as autonomous vehicles, health care, finance, military, and law enforcement—areas that “rely heavily on accurate decision-making and can suffer severe consequences if AI systems misbehave or provide misleading outputs,” he said.

Read the rest here…

If there is one prevailing misconception about the war in Iran, it is the idea that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz will hurt the US the most.  This is simply not the case.  In reality, only around 7% of US oil imports actually travel through the Hormuz to get to American markets.  The potential long term instability in the strait is far more damaging to economies in the East, and by extension, Australia faces potential crisis.

Direct petroleum imports are not the biggest problem for Australia; around 15% of their oil crosses the Hormuz.  Instead, the country relies heavily on refined fuel products exported from Asia, and Asian countries rely on the Hormuz for 40% to 70% of total oil needed for the refining process.  Over 50% of Australia’s refined fuel products rely on oil passing through the Hormuz.   

This means that a vast majority of Australia’s diesel, gasoline, jet fuel and kerosene is on the verge of a supply collapse should the Hormuz remain under threat.  Experts suggest the country has one month before crisis strikes and rationing is implemented.  

Contracted shipments of oil to Australia were all but guaranteed for at least the next month, Energy Minister Chris Bowen said.  

“The oil companies say to me that they fully expect all deliveries all through March and well into April, but we are in an internationally uncertain time and that’s why we’re doing such planning at the moment…”

NRMA spokesman Peter Khoury has urged people to remain calm, saying there has never been a point in Australia’s history when supply wasn’t coming in. 

“As long as supply continues there is no need to panic, and supply has been continuing…”

The reasons for Australia’s oil vulnerability are numerous, but much of the blame can be attributed to a lack of government concern over energy independence and an ongoing progressive obsession with climate change and “green energy” projects.  

The Aussie government does subsidize the domestic oil industry, however, this is done largely to maintain rather than expand capacity.  Australia’s two refineries are aging and contribute only 20% of the nation’s total fuel products.  Asian imports are cheaper, but that’s only under stable geopolitical conditions (which is becoming obvious).  Australia’s refusal to improve and expand their own production is coming back to bite them.

On top of their crippling reliance on Asia, the far-left Australian government has set the country up for economic suicide by implementing nonsensical carbon restrictions and climate change mandates.  They have diverted over $22 billion into green tech, which is far less efficient and not yet capable of running the majority of their power infrastructure.

Oil exploration is increasingly difficult and there are no plans for new refineries. Furthermore, nuclear energy is completely banned since 1998. 

Australia’s entire energy infrastructure is built around a “just in time” import model.  Meaning, the country does not have a reliable long term store of fuel products for emergency use.  The government only introduced a “Minimum Stockholding Obligation” (MSO) in 2023 due to the start of the Ukraine war.  This gives the economy around 30 days for supplies of all products before total breakdown. 

Australia is the only IEA member that has not met the mandatory 90 days of net import equivalent reserves since 2012 (most hold 140+ days on average)

And, given that they have limited domestic production, there is no way for the country to adapt to a crisis.  It would take them years to recover without ample imports.  Shipping data reveals oil supplies from the United States are now heading across the Pacific to help meet demand. 

The crude oil tanker Unity Venture arrived at Brisbane Anchorage on Monday after traveling approximately 14,000 kilometers across the Pacific, carrying a cargo of crude oil.  The arrival comes as two additional tankers chartered by energy giant ExxonMobil are preparing to ship around 600,000 barrels of refined fuel, including petrol, diesel and aviation fuel, from Texas to Australia. 

But, the US cannot realistically fill Australia’s full refined fuel supply needs (around 850,000–900,000 barrels per day of imports) in a timely, scalable, or cost-effective way.  In the best case scenario, Australia could receive a portion of this supply, forcing them to enact rationing.  This means incredibly high prices on gas, an industrial slowdown and a deflation in the general economy. 

It also means a slowdown in freight, panic buying and the possibility of empty shelves in grocery stores.  In other words, a SHTF scenario. 

It is especially confounding, in light of this situation, that Australia rejected the Trump Administration’s request for help to secure the Strait of Hormuz.  This request was largely symbolic and it’s unlikely that the US would need the help of Australia to get the job done, but common sense would dictate that the Australian government would want to secure their own energy supplies as quickly as possible.  

Instead, it would appear that the country has chosen economic self destruction in the name of political virtue signaling.  If they are lucky, the war will be over quickly, but it’s quite the gamble.  

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Some U.S. airports may be forced to close down if lawmakers fail to reach a deal to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and end the partial government shutdown, a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) official said on March 17.

Acting Deputy TSA Administrator Adam Stahl told Fox News that the TSA has “fully depleted” its available workforce from the National Deployment Office to cover staffing shortages at airports.

“So at this point, we’re fully stretched. Frankly, there’s not much else we can do,” he told the news outlet. “As the weeks continue, if this continues, it’s not hyperbole to suggest that we may have to quite literally shut down airports, particularly smaller ones.”

Stahl said the government shutdown has placed financial strain on TSA workers living paycheck to paycheck, with some sleeping in their cars and drawing blood to pay for expenses.

“If there’s not action taken, particularly from Senate Democrats, this is going to get worse,” he said. “It’s not going to get better, and there will be significant pain for passengers as well. Three [to] four-hour wait time at select airports.”

Funding for DHS lapsed last month after Congress failed to strike a deal on immigration reforms sought by Democrats following the fatal shooting of two U.S. citizens by federal immigration agents during operations in Minnesota earlier this year.

The partial shutdown has left about 50,000 TSA officers working without pay. More than 300 officers have quit from the agency during the shutdown, according to DHS.

The department said that just over 10 percent of TSA officers were absent from work on March 15.

The CEOs of major U.S. airlines wrote a joint letter on March 15 urging congressional leaders to come together immediately to negotiate a deal to fund DHS and end the partial government shutdown.

In the letter, the CEOs said it is unacceptable for TSA workers to go without pay, noting that it is “difficult, if not impossible, to put food on the table, put gas in the car and pay rent” when they are not getting paid.

“This problem is solvable, and there are solutions on the table. Now it’s up to you, Congress, to move forward on bipartisan proposals that will get federal aviation workers—including TSA officers, U.S. Customs clearance officers at airports and air traffic controllers—paid during shutdowns,” the CEOs said.

The previous government shutdown last fall lasted 43 days, causing widespread flight disruptions and forcing the Federal Aviation Administration to order 10 percent reductions at major airports nationwide.

Jacob Burg and Reuters contributed to this report.

Senior bankers at China’s state-backed financial institutions are preparing for bonus cuts of at least 30% as Beijing presses ahead with sweeping pay reforms across its $69 trillion financial sector, according to Bloomberg.

At two major state-owned banks, senior managers — including department heads — saw their 2025 bonuses reduced by 30% to 50%, according to people familiar with the matter. At a mid-sized national lender, division chiefs experienced roughly a 40% drop in variable pay last year.

The cuts are part of a broader campaign by Xi Jinping to promote “common prosperity” and curb what officials describe as the extravagant lifestyles of top bankers.

Regulators are also trying to address a pay imbalance in the industry. In many Chinese financial firms, mid-level managers have historically earned more than top executives, whose compensation is capped due to their status as Communist Party officials.

Bloomberg writes that late last year, the Ministry of Finance asked major state-backed institutions to submit plans to overhaul compensation structures. While many firms are still waiting for approval, some have already implemented retroactive pay cuts. Bonuses are the main target because variable pay typically makes up 50% to 70% of managers’ total compensation.

Meanwhile, international banks with a large presence in Asia, such as HSBC Holdings and Standard Chartered, increased their bonus pools by about 10%.

The belt-tightening extends beyond banks. A major state-owned insurer also reduced 2024 bonuses for mid-level managers by at least 30%, according to a person familiar with the decision.

Chinese banks posted combined profits of 2.38 trillion yuan ($346 billion) last year, up 2.3%, despite shrinking margins and non-performing loans remaining near record highs.

The bonus cuts reflect tighter government control over a sector once known for generous pay. Alongside compensation reforms, authorities have stepped up anti-corruption efforts, leading to several high-profile investigations and harsh penalties.

Even so, parts of the industry are beginning to stabilize. A recent rise in dealmaking has prompted some Chinese brokerage firms to rebuild investment banking teams by hiring dozens of junior and mid-level staff. Some firms have also moved to raise base salaries closer to pre-crackdown levels to stay competitive for talent, though bonuses remain closely monitored by regulators.