Authored by T.J. Muscaro via The Epoch Times,

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told members of the Air Force and Space Force that communist China will land on the moon, and it’s imperative that the United States return to the lunar surface first.

“You are witnessing a very energized NASA, and we will need to be, as we are in the midst of a very real second space race,” he said during his keynote address to the Air and Space Forces Association’s annual conference on Sept. 15. “China will accomplish what the Soviets never could.”

He told the Airmen and Guardians that communist China has demonstrated rocket reusability and developed a plan to land their astronauts – called taikonauts – with just two rocket launches, while NASA will need at least four to do the same. China also seeks to build a nuclear-powered moon base on the lunar south pole with the Russians.

“History has shown they could even be early, and we could easily be late,” he said.

“Success in this endeavor will be measured in months, not years.”

The China National Space Administration has announced plans to land taikonauts on the moon by 2030, while NASA aims to return its astronauts to the lunar surface before the end of 2028.

But Isaacman made it clear that this race is about far more than just bragging rights.

“Our allies and adversaries are watching,” he said. “So is every nation deciding whose technology to buy, whose standards to adopt, whose security relationships to deepen, and whose vision of the future to follow, and, perhaps most importantly, our children will be watching, and the hopes and dreams of a generation inspired by these kinds of Apollo 11-like moments [are] really on the line.”

One advantage he said that the United States did have over its communist adversaries was the booming commercial space industry pioneering reusable heavy-lift capabilities. But he added that NASA was not on a path to win this new space race until recently.

“I’m thankful for the reality that the Chinese have a plan to potentially, you know, to likely deny that critical area on the lunar south pole because it’s given us the latitude to fix what is broken, to stop all the external impositions, the self-inflicted wounds that we had in our strategy, and bring extreme focus and mission,” he said.

Some of those self-inflicted wounds included an inefficient launch cadence of both the Space Launch System moon rocket and robotic missions to the lunar surface, the decision to prioritize a lunar space station over a surface base, and a general lack of sufficient focus on winning the race.

Now, thanks to President Donald Trump’s space policy, Isaacman said that moon rocket production was becoming standardized to increase launch capabilities, robotic missions will be flying to the moon at a cadence of almost once a month starting in 2027, and an unapologetic focus was put back on establishing a permanent human presence on the surface.

“Fortunately, we have a president who understands that great nations remain great by continuously undertaking and achieving the kind of big, bold endeavors that define American exceptionalism,” he said. “These are no longer just stories in history books. This is what you’ve been waiting for, and this is our time.

“This is the golden age. We are going back. We are going back to stay, to build the base. We are doing it together to show the world once again what America is capable of achieving and inspire the next generation to pick up the fire of exploration and carry it farther than we ever could.”

Scientists at Stanford University have created mice whose brains are largely built from human cells, a shocking, first-of-its-kind experiment that is raising serious questions about how far researchers should be allowed to go.

In a study published Wednesday in Nature, Stanford neuroscientist Sergiu Pașca said the development represents the most extensive integration of human neural tissue into an animal ever achieved.

The researchers started by genetically engineering mice so that most of the cells meant to form the cortex and hippocampus died off early in development. Those regions normally account for roughly half of a mouse’s brain. The animals survived as other parts of the brain picked up the slack, though they were more forgetful and slightly clumsy.

Then scientists filled the empty space with human brain organoids, tiny clusters of neurons grown from reprogrammed human skin cells. Newborn mice received several injections totaling a few hundred thousand human cells.

Within two to three months, the human tissue had grown nearly fivefold, filling more than 90% of the vacant cortex and reaching about four million human neurons. The grafts hooked into the mouse’s blood supply, fired electrical signals, and extended fibers all the way down to the spinal cord.

Researchers also spotted rare human cell types that have been difficult to grow in a lab, including neurons resembling von Economo cells, which are linked to social behavior.

Still, the researchers were quick to stress that these are merely mice, not “thinking like humans.” The animals retain mouse senses, mouse bodies and the deeper structures of a mouse brain. In behavioral testing, they appeared largely like ordinary mice. In fact, the study claimed that the human tissue appeared to improve the mice’s performance during maze tests than those left without most of their cortex.

“We’ve been trying really hard as a community to find therapeutic solutions for these conditions, but the reality is that in psychiatry and neurology we’ve been left behind [by] every single branch of medicine and we have fewer therapeutics than, again, every single branch of medicine,” said Pașca in a statement obtained by The Guardian. “That could be because the human brain is very complex, but it’s also because the human brain is inaccessible. To a large extent, our goal has been to make aspects of human brain development and function accessible for investigation.”

* * *

Authored by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times,

A dozen operators of allegedly fake daycare sites in Southern California were arrested last week on suspicion of stealing an estimated $10 million in funding, Justice Department officials announced on Sept. 15.

On Sept. 10, federal agents swarmed the San Diego-area homes listed as daycares by the operators and arrested the suspects, six males and six females.

Nine of the defendants entered the United States as refugees or asylum seekers from Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq, according to court records. Eleven have since become naturalized citizens, according to Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald of the Justice Department’s National Fraud Enforcement Division.

“There were no children. There were no daycares. These daycares were fake and the taxpayers were paying for all of it,” McDonald said during a news conference.

Each defendant was charged with one federal count of wire fraud in Operation Cradle to Grift. If convicted, they face a maximum penalty of 20 years in federal prison and a $500,000 fine.

Some defendants are also charged with money laundering, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ), which carries the same maximum prison term and fine.

“Fraud against these programs is an attack on vulnerable families, and law enforcement will continue to dismantle schemes that exploit them,” McDonald said.

Criminal investigators followed a money train, uncovering more than $10 million in fraudulent billing, according to Chief Jarod Koopman of the IRS’s criminal investigations division.

“This is not a victimless crime,” Koopman said. “It deprived working parents of critical support and eroded trust in programs meant to protect the most vulnerable in our communities.”

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sends federal funds to California to help low-income families pay for childcare. In San Diego County, childcare subsidy programs are administered by the county, the nonprofit Child Development Associates, and the YMCA.

When a family qualifies for funding, the childcare providers are paid directly after the provider submits monthly attendance records. The records are signed by the provider and the parents.

California laws prevent schools and childcare centers from collecting or sharing immigration information, allowing all parents to apply for the state’s subsidized and free daycare assistance, which is paid in part by federal grant funding.

State law requires licensed childcare providers to be on site and ensure that children are supervised at all times. The 12 cases investigated in the San Diego area are unrelated, but they allegedly used the same formula, according to the DOJ.

The defendants allegedly were granted a childcare operating license by a California state agency and registered with the local programs.

Investigators accused the defendants of submitting fake attendance records and signing affidavits saying that they were accurate. Using the false records, the programs paid the operators with government funds, according to the allegations.

In one case, Abdulrahman Ayman Alawad, 25, a Syrian who lives in El Cajon, allegedly claimed that he provided childcare to 23 kids in March and 25 in April. He eventually received more than $300,000 in payments from San Diego County, the nonprofit Child Development Associates, and the YMCA in 2025, according to court records.

Alawad allegedly said he provided childcare every day of those two months. Investigators claimed that surveillance footage showed children entering or exiting the facility on just one day during those two months, which was the day a state inspector showed up for an unannounced visit.

Prosecutors also accused Alawad and several other defendants of submitting records claiming to have provided childcare at their homes when border crossing records showed that they were not in the United States.

Each defendant earned $538,000 to $1.2 million during their alleged schemes, which lasted from months to years, prosecutors said.

“Today is a bad day for home daycare fraud,” said Adam Gordon, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California.

Besides Alawad, the defendants are Fosiya Mohamoud, 50, of El Cajon, from Somalia; Zetun Abdi, 43, of San Diego, from Somalia; Ikramullah Mohmmand, 25, of El Cajon, from Afghanistan; Khetam Haouash, 37, of El Cajon, from Syria; Khatera Hashimi, 39, of El Cajon, from Afghanistan; Mariam Khamis, 42, of San Diego, from Sudan; Mohamad Alawad, 29, of San Diego, from Syria; Mazin Alawad, 22, of San Diego, from Syria; Turkiya Alawad, 63, of San Diego, from Syria; Zaryab Daudzai, 25, of El Cajon, from Afghanistan; and Cezar Yaqoob, 36, of El Cajon, from Iraq.

The operation was the work of the DOJ’s National Fraud Enforcement Division, a task force to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in federal benefit programs chaired by Vice President JD Vance.

It was unclear whether the defendants had legal representation. They could not be contacted for comment.

Authored by Ken Buck via The Epoch Times,

Despite a lot of talk about fiscal responsibility, lawmakers in Washington are continuing to run up the tab on America’s already maxed-out credit card.

The U.S. annual deficit – the difference between the revenue that the federal government collects and what it spends each year – reached $1.8 trillion through the first 10 months of the current fiscal year. With two months still left to go, this year’s deficit will exceed $2 trillion.

In non-pandemic years, the U.S. deficit has never surpassed $1.8 trillion in a single year.

Our economy is growing, unemployment remains low, and there is no national emergency forcing the government’s hand. So, what gives? Why can’t Washington get our fiscal house in order? As the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget put it, this is “not normal.”

High borrowing costs, which are a result of our country’s yawning national debt (the cumulative total of each year’s deficit), are a major driver. The U.S. Treasury yield, which is the interest rate the government must pay on bonds issued for debt, hit a 19-year high this month, 5.34 percent.

In other words, as the national debt continues to climb, creditors are wary that the federal government will be able to repay its obligations and therefore demand a higher return. That means more revenue – almost 20 cents of every tax dollar, higher than the previous record set in 1991 – now goes to paying interest rather than investing in our country.

The real problem, however, is Washington’s unbridled spending spree. Democrats insist on more federal programs, even as the price tag for existing entitlements continues to grow, and annual shortfalls continue to mount. Federal spending increased by 5 percent this year compared to last, while revenue only grew 3 percent.

Sadly, even conservatives have gone along with the ruse. The Big Beautiful Bill, Republicans’ landmark reconciliation package last year, promised to cut a lot of government waste and kept taxes low, but it failed to get to the root of the federal growth. Without serious entitlement reform, tax cuts leave the budget hole even larger.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Big Beautiful Bill would add $3.4 trillion to the national debt over 10 years, and as much as $4.5 trillion when factoring in interest payments.

Don’t get me wrong, Republicans’ tax cuts are a smart way to spur economic growth, which is one way to improve our country’s finances. When the private sector can invest its money, rather than pay it to Uncle Sam, it creates jobs and economic activity – which fill the public coffers. The government doesn’t create jobs; businesses do. When companies and workers do well, so does the government.

But tax cuts must be offset by meaningful spending reductions. Addressing just one side of the ledger is like damming half a river; it doesn’t fix deficits.

Getting our annual deficits in check doesn’t mean looking back; it requires looking forward. It’s a live decision, one that’s happening at the same time the administration is asking Congress for a 19 percent increase in discretionary spending – which would be the second-largest bump in at least six decades.

Lawmakers must look at our deficit-spending addiction holistically. To his credit, President Donald Trump’s 2027 budget proposes cutting non-defense spending by 10 percent. However, those gains are more than negated in defense spending. That’s a critical priority, but funding must be offset with significant spending reductions. That means programs that have long been a political third rail, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

While slashing entitlement historically has not been a winning recipe for getting reelected, voters understand what’s at stake, and they want leaders who will make the right decisions.

Over eight in 10 Americans are more concerned about the national debt now compared to a few years ago, and 85 percent want Congress and the White House to do more to address it.

The heightened awareness owes to voters’ own understanding. Nine in 10 people realize that our country’s debt problem is driving up costs of living and making personal borrowing more expensive.

Eliminating our country’s annual deficits is achievable, and doing so will get our national debt on a path to be paid down. But it will take bold leaders who will set realistic goals and have the political courage to achieve them. That’s a tall ask in Washington these days, but voters should demand it when they go to vote this fall.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

On September 4, the US Treasury unveiled sanctions against a Turkey-based bank and two of its subsidiaries, accusing them of moving tens of millions of dollars on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force and facilitating Tehran’s movement of funds across the international banking system. 

It did not take long for the Turkish government to sweep in and act to contain the damage and what some interpret as a national reputational hit, which was one of the opening salvoes in the Trump/Bessent ‘Economic D-Day’ and secondary sanctions (Operation Economic Outcast) targeting Tehran and entities still doing business with the Islamic Republic.

On Wednesday Turkey’s banking regulator has taken over most shareholder rights of the US-targeted bank – the Golden ⁠Global Yatirim Bankasi – through the country’s state deposit insurer, TMSF (Savings Deposit Insurance Fund).

Turkish media notes that “The decision gives the fund the authority to exercise the shareholder rights attached to the stakes, while specifically excluding dividend rights.”

The newly reassigned rights cover 99.98 percent of the shares in the bank, reports also detail.

Publicly available figures indicate that Golden Global Investment Bank is a small and young bank, having €498 million ($574.5 million) in total assets, and was only founded in 2019.

In the wake of the US action, US Ambassador to Turkey and Trump special envoy for the broader region Tom Barrack had sought to calm the Turkish government by saying Washington is only targeting specific financial institutions and this is not meant as a shot against Turkey itself.

“This designation is aimed at the conduct of one entity, not at a nation, not at a banking system, and not at an ally,” Barrack wrote on X.

He further declared it would be “a serious error” to interpret the measure as a judgment on the Turkish ally as a whole.

The country’s Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek had simply acknowledged last week that Ankara had taken note of US Treasury announcements – suggesting some kind of serious house cleaning could soon follow.

OFAC alleges the bank was created to help Iranian oil revenues reach Turkey from China, where exchangers converted the funds into cash and gold, and accuses it of opening correspondent banking to Iranian institutions through accounts under Quds Force control. There are reports saying the bank has officially rejected the charges against it.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

A Dutch ‘activist’ who climbed Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, sprayed it with “Zionist war criminal,” “Globalise the Intifada” and Hamas-style red triangles, then argued the graffiti didn’t count because it could be washed off, has walked out of Southwark Crown Court a free man.

The bill for cleaning the monument ran into thousands. The man who did it has escaped criminal charges.

Olax Outis, also known as Caspar San Giorgi, 39, defaced Churchill earlier this year while wearing a red boiler suit reading “I support Palestine Action.” Prosecutor Peter Ratliff told jurors he sprayed the words ‘Free Palestine’ and red triangles on the front, and ‘Never Again Is Now’ on the rear. On the plinth he scrawled ‘Globalise the Intifada,’ ‘Stop the Genocide’ and ‘Zionist war criminal,’ plus a Dutch line he later rendered as ‘The Hague sends their regards.’

UPDATE: The Dutch Palestine Action fan who vandalised Winston Churchill’s statue with slogans like “Globalise the Intifada” and red triangles was just found NOT GUILTY of criminal damage. This country’s legal system is a nasty joke. pic.twitter.com/HYmjUTnZGy

— Heidi Bachram (@HeidiBachram) September 15, 2026

A Greater London Authority heritage warden saw him doing it and called the police. Officers were there within two minutes. Specialist cleaners were not far behind. Court figures put the damage at £11,970 when he was first charged. Later reporting on the restoration bill listed more than £7,000, including police barriers at £612 plus VAT and an emergency clean and restore at £6,504 plus VAT.

He denied criminal damage. The paint was washable, he said. He was “sending a message to parliament.” He was “preventing a crime.” The jury agreed he was not guilty.

In the dock he was unrepentant. “I’m proud to be a citizen of The Hague,” he told them. “If I had a larger canvas and more time, I would have written if Keir Starmer doesn’t come to The Hague, The Hague will come for him. My wish is to see him on trial in The Hague.” On the verdict itself: “Whether you convict me or not is not too much of a concern for me. Whether I get acquitted, deported, imprisoned for years, I can be proud of having spoken about injustice and I have accounted for my actions. I will accept your judgement.”

‘It is pathetic! It is astonishing! I cannot believe the country we live in.’ @MartinDaubney fumes at confirmation that the man who painted ‘Free Palestine’ on the Chrurchill statue in Westminster being cleared of criminal damage. pic.twitter.com/t4pWNeXiu8

— GB News (@GBNEWS) September 15, 2026

He had already claimed the stunt online. He had come to Britain, he said, to “deface a statue of one of history’s most well-known war criminals, Winston Churchill.” Churchill, in his telling, was “the Keir Starmer of his time.”

Downing Street called the vandalism “completely abhorrent” in February and said Churchill was “a great Briton” who “must be held to account.” The Home Office called the vandals “a disgrace.” The Greater London Authority said it was “appalled.” Six months later a jury decided the spray cans did not amount to a crime.

‘Many people find it an abhorrent form of protest.’

Social policy analyst Dr Rakib Ehsan reacts to an activist being cleared of ‘desecrating’ the Winston Churchill outside of Parliament. pic.twitter.com/w8hNxroiDg

— GB News (@GBNEWS) September 15, 2026

Heidi Bachram, whose husband’s relatives were murdered and taken hostage by Hamas, blasted the decision, urging “This country’s legal system is a nasty joke,”and adding “He should have been deported.” A foreigner, she noted, can “paint a threat to Jews on the statue of our greatest leader with the added red triangle to make clear it isn’t the ‘peaceful’ version of Intifada and GET AWAY WITH IT.”

This is the closing speech of Olax Outis where he says he should have done something more “spectacular”. Like burning down a weapons factory as a group did in Czech Republic. This is extraordinary and I cannot comprehend this man is walking free. pic.twitter.com/vstz61VJwr

— Heidi Bachram (@HeidiBachram) September 15, 2026

What I don’t understand about the jury sympathising with this guy is his blatant disingenuousness. Here he complains about not getting an interpreter while speaking in almost perfect English. We live in Bizarro World. pic.twitter.com/plMYxyn3E5

— Heidi Bachram (@HeidiBachram) September 15, 2026

You won’t even get convicted as along as it’s ‘protest’. I wonder if this would have happened if it were far right messages though.

— Heidi Bachram (@HeidiBachram) September 15, 2026

This is a disgusting ruling that will only embolden far-left thugs to vandalise our national hero’s statue time and time again.

Would the same injustice have been done if it were Gandhi’s or Mandela’s statue that had been defaced? https://t.co/MjwUN4oeh4

— Alex Armstrong (@Alexarmstrong) September 15, 2026

WANKER who did this, desecrated Winston Churchill found not guilty of criminal damage arguing in court the paint washed off.

A Green light for these bastards to do the same to anything else.

Imagine if you threw some of that on a Mosque, your feet wouldn’t touch the floor…. pic.twitter.com/pYiYrgKwiG

— Tony (@EvacTony) September 15, 2026

That is the two-tier point, and it is not a slogan. The Met and Greater Manchester Police spent last winter warning that “globalise the intifada” could get you arrested. The same words went up in red on Churchill’s monument. The man who put them there told a jury the paint came off. The jury said not guilty.

None of this sits in a vacuum. Churchill is being taken apart in official rooms while activists take him apart in the square.

Last week it emerged the Bank of England had spent more than £85,000 researching how to get him off the £5 note. Consultants told officials that portraits of notable Britons were “elitist and divisive,” a “backward-looking vision of the UK that carries too great a risk of division and controversy.” Hedgehogs and puffins are waiting in the wings. Nigel Farage called the plan “absolutely crackers.” Kemi Badenoch called it “erasing our history.”

The same city that cannot convict a man for spraying “Zionist war criminal” across Churchill is being lectured by the UN’s racial discrimination committee to put up statues of people of African descent as atonement for slavery – as if Britain had not banned the trade, spent blood and treasure suppressing it, and already spent years ripping down or boxing up its own monuments.

Sadiq Khan’s Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm was built for that mood. Churchill’s statue was boarded up in 2020. The lecture has not stopped.

Churchill’s statue today in London. I’m speechless. pic.twitter.com/lU6Y37my7e

— Antonello Guerrera (@antoguerrera) June 12, 2020

They even installed the punchline. On Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth last week City Hall unveiled Tschabalala Self’s five-metre Lady in Blue – sold as an “everywoman,” a “symbol of confidence and purpose,” and, in the CNN version, a win because it is “not another White man.” It stands in the ceremonial heart of the capital, opposite Nelson, paid for out of the same public art machine that treats British victory as an embarrassment.

Picture the same red paint poured all over that figure. The press releases write themselves. The outrage would be industrial.

In a rare development, Belarus – which forms a ‘Union State’ with Russia, has received partial US sanctions relief after it agreed to free 25 political prisoners. 

President Trump’s envoy, John Coale, revealed to reporters in the Belarusian capital Minsk: “We agreed to an interim deal, and as a show of goodwill Belarus will release 25 people and in exchange the United States will lift sanctions on two companies.”

The deal follows a much bigger amnesty for prisoners brokered by Washington that occurred last March. At that time the Lukashenko government freed a huge amount – 250 people.

“We will continue to improve U.S.-Belarus relations and are working to secure the release of more people in the very near future. We are not finished!” Coale had later posted on X.

One regional outlet has outlined what the Belarussians are getting in return:

The two companies to be removed from U.S. sanctions are Lakokraska, a manufacturer of paints and industrial coatings, and Bellesbumprom, a state-owned industrial concern that oversees the forestry, pulp and paper sectors. Sanctions against them have been in place since 2008 and 2023, respectively.

Coale also promised Lukashenko on Tuesday to get U.S. banks to hand back tens of millions of dollars in frozen Belarusian assets.

Back in September of 2025, there had been an initial breakthrough deal which centered on the release of 52 prisoners deemed held on political grounds, such as based on speech or political activism.

Russia’s aviation sector has also long been sanctioned, leading to the potential for unsafe travel or possible aerial disasters – as aging fleets are in need of regular servicing, often dependent on access to US and Western parts. This is something Minsk has also sought to grain relief from Washington for.

President Trump has in the recent past indicated that he looks forward to meeting with President Lukashenko in the future, in a sign of a likely further thawing of relations.

BREAKING:

Belarus has freed 25 political prisoners. They are now in Lithuania.

U.S. special envoy John Coale published a photo of those released.

Among them are journalists, musicians, lawyers, and other well-known protest figures. pic.twitter.com/5CH31mdVgJ

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) September 16, 2026

More broadly, this is also part of US efforts to reverse spiraling bilateral relations with Moscow, given that Russia and Belarus work hand and glove in defense, economic, and political areas. Belarusian territory has long been a staging ground for Putin’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine as well, and hosts Russian tactical nukes – which Europe has long kept a very close eye on.

Authored by Paul Birch via The Daily Sceptic,

Many of us in Britain still flatter ourselves that we live in a free country. Although the UK isn’t quite a police state (not yet anyway), neither is it a country in which the individual can any longer speak without glancing over his or her shoulder. The old compact of a liberal society was simple – the state punished genuine criminality, while opinion was left to the rough justice of argument, satire and public disagreement.

That compact has now been comprehensively torn up. Across Britain, speech that would once have been answered by rebuttal or humour is now treated as a matter for police, regulators and secretive Whitehall machinery. A report published this week by civil liberties and privacy campaigning organisation Big Brother Watch states that more than 62,000 people in the United Kingdom were arrested for communications offences over a five year period, with at least 18,500 charged and 12,292 convicted. These numbers should alarm anyone who still believes the citizen is master and the state is servant.

This is not some marginal administrative adjustment. It is the apparatus of speech control operating on an industrial scale. Some cases will involve genuine threats – stalking, domestic abuse or harassment – and those cases should, of course, be investigated. But when arrest numbers vastly outstrip those of conviction, as is highlighted in the report, it is clear the process itself has become the punishment. The knock at the door, the search, the device seizure, the interview, the stigma, the potential loss of employment and the unmistakable lesson to everyone watching – keep quiet.

Worse, enforcement appears completely arbitrary. Big Brother Watch has described a “postcode lottery” of speech policing, with sharply different arrest rates between forces. Cumbria was reported as arresting people at dramatically higher rates than neighbouring Northumbria (although Cumbria Police has history when it comes to ‘woke’ policing). Liberty which varies by postcode is not liberty at all. It is permission, granted or withheld by local institutional mood. If the same national law produces radically different policing outcomes, the law is either too vague to restrain power or too tempting for power to resist.

The root of the problem lies in modern speech law and its elasticity. The Crown Prosecution Service guidance on communications offences covers offences under the Malicious Communications Act 1988, the Communications Act 2003 and Part 10 of the Online Safety Act 2023, including offences involving false or threatening communications. The framework encompasses messages said to be “grossly offensive”, “indecent”, “obscene” or “menacing”. Those words may sound reassuring in a statute book, but in the hands of ideological bureaucracies they become draconian tools to subdue inconvenient perspectives.

Recent cases expose the rot. In Hertfordshire, Rosalind Levine and Maxie Allen were arrested after complaints about their daughter’s primary school appeared in a parents’ WhatsApp group. They were held for eleven hours on suspicion including harassment and malicious communications. Hertfordshire Police later admitted the legal criteria for arrest were not met and agreed to pay them £20,000 in compensation. This is what happens when public bodies discover that the police can be weaponised as a complaints department with handcuffs.

The same authoritarian drift is visible with the now notorious notion of the Non-Crime Hate Incident. The clue is in the name – no crime has been committed. Lawful speech has been recorded by police in a way that brands ordinary people with a quasi-criminal stain. The College of Policing has now proposed major reforms, explicitly recognising that lawful free speech is not a police matter and that personal data should be recorded only where there is a clear policing purpose. That admission matters. It is an institutional confession that the state wandered far beyond its proper boundary – although it remains to be seen how police senior management across the country, many of whom are politically motivated, interpret these reforms.

My final role in policing involved facilitating the removal of terrorist content from the internet. This consisted of clear, unequivocal material glamourising proscribed groups, often including graphic footage of combat and the murder of captives. However, we began to notice that we were being tasked increasingly to assess content which was much more subjective: not violent or calling for violence, but ‘hateful’ – and only if viewed from a very specific point on the philosophical spectrum. This became more apparent with the establishment of police hate crime teams, and the fact that pursuing a nebulous ‘far Right’ was something which could gain one significant career advantages.

Then there is the darker machinery of government itself. Big Brother Watch’s ‘ Ministry of Truth‘ investigation alleged that secretive Whitehall counter-disinformation units monitor lawful political dissent online, including politicians, journalists, academics, campaigners and members of the public. In counter-terrorism policing, we were aware of the existence of some such units, but it is now clear this operation is much more extensive and that it runs much deeper than at first thought.

The public are told this is all about ‘misinformation’, but it has drifted into monitoring criticism of government policy. This is how censorship grows in a democracy – not with bonfires of books, but with dashboards, ‘trusted-flagger’ relationships, ‘narrative’ reports and officials quietly nudging platforms to reduce the reach of inconvenient opinions.

The Online Safety Act has only exacerbated the danger by shifting censorship pressure onto content service providers. Defenders say it targets illegality and protects children. Yet the predictable and inevitable result of duties, regulatory risk and political panic, is over-removal. Platforms don’t need to be commanded in plain language to censor; they need only be made afraid. Risk-averse companies will hide lawful speech, demand identity checks, throttle debate and call it compliance. The censor’s hand now often wears a corporate glove, especially if advertising revenue streams are threatened.

A serious country punishes tangible threats, criminality and violence. It doesn’t send the police after off-colour jokes, parental complaints or political dissent. We have to choose. We can choose to remain a liberal democracy in which the state respects the citizen, or we can become a managerial state in which the citizen fears a file, a knock on the door, a call from an online safety team or the quiet downgrade of their opinions.

Speech offences need to be drastically narrowed to those which call for direct violence or harm; ideological intelligence-gathering against lawful expression should be abolished; regulators ought to be restrained, and government content-flagging outside the terrorist space must be transparent.

Free speech isn’t a courtesy extended by ministers, chief constables or Silicon Valley compliance teams. It is the condition of citizenship in any civilised country. Without it, liberty is just a word in the dictionary.

Authored by Karl-Friedrich Israel via The Daily Economy,

The median-priced home in America now costs $440,600, while the median household earns roughly $84,000 a year. That gap has left a growing share of Americans priced out of buying altogether, while those who already own homes and hold stocks have watched their wealth compound. The renter-owner wealth gap is now the widest on record. Meanwhile, equity markets keep setting new highs. None of this, officially, counts as inflation.

In a previous piece, I explained that the Consumer Price Index leaves out a large and growing share of what households are really forced to pay for: government spending financed by taxes rather than purchased voluntarily on markets. That is one CPI blind spot. There is a second, and it is arguably more consequential for how Americans experience economic reality. The price of stocks, homes, and other assets essentially does not appear at all in conventional inflation measures.

Why Asset Prices Fall Outside The CPI

The reason again traces back to the index-number theory Gottfried Haberler laid out in Vienna in 1927, which I’ve written about elsewhere. Haberler showed that the standard price indices economists use – Laspeyres and Paasche, and averages of the two – can be trusted as measures of an individual’s true cost of living only under a specific set of assumptions about that individual. One of those unstated assumptions is that the individual is a pure consumer: someone who spends the whole of their income on present consumption, full stop. No saving. No portfolio. No home, or even portion of a home, purchased as an investment rather than simply a place to live.

That assumption is a reasonable simplification for the sake of theoretical tractability. It is also the reason a stock portfolio or a home’s resale value has no place in a cost-of-living index built on Haberler’s logic. The CPI does track shelter, but only through “owners’ equivalent rent” – an estimate of what it would cost to rent the service flow of a home, not the price of the home as an asset. Equities do not enter the index in any form. A pure consumer, by design, does not hold assets. An index built for a pure consumer has nothing to say about what happens to their prices.

A Reasonable Exclusion With A Widening Consequence

That exclusion made the CPI theoretically coherent – it’s meant to measure consumer spending, after all. It also means that some of the fastest price inflation in the American economy over the past three decades has been completely invisible to the number the Federal Reserve targets (the PCE price index) and the media reports (the CPI).

Since 1995, the S&P 500 has compounded at roughly 9.2 percent a year (15x) and home prices, as measured by the Case-Shiller index, at about 4.7 percent a year (4x). The CPI, over the same period, rose about 2.6 percent a year (2.2x). Stocks have outrun consumer prices by a factor of more than three; home prices, by nearly two. The CPI alone has no way of seeing any of these inflationary pressures – not the run-up in home prices that has priced many younger Americans out of the market, nor the equity gains flowing overwhelmingly to households that already owned assets before the run-up began.

Why Assets, In Particular?

If asset prices simply drifted upward for reasons unrelated to monetary policy, and the PCE’s and CPI’s exclusion of them was a harmless accident, we might more easily excuse CPI’s shortcomings. But there is a plausible monetary explanation for why the exclusion has mattered so much specifically since the mid-1990s.

If money were neutral and its growth simply distributed itself proportionally across real output growth and consumer price inflation, the M2 money supply should grow at roughly the sum of real GDP growth and CPI inflation over time. We can check that directly: take average M2 growth and subtract the sum of average real GDP growth and average CPI growth, before and after 1995.

From 1959 through 1994, M2 grew at 7.2 percent a year, against real GDP growth of 3.5 percent and CPI inflation of 4.7 percent – a combined 8.2 percent. The gap was slightly negative: roughly 1.0 percentage point a year. Money growth, if anything, ran a bit behind the pace of real economic growth and consumer price inflation combined.

Since 1995, the picture flips. M2 has grown at 6.2 percent a year, while real GDP and the CPI have grown at 2.5 percent per year each – a combined 5.0 percent. The gap is now a positive 1.2 percentage points a year, a swing of roughly two full points from the prior 35 years.

That is not a rounding error compounding harmlessly in the background. Over three decades, a persistent 1.2-point annual gap compounds into a very large sum of money that was created by government, but not absorbed by real output growth. By definition, it did not show up as measured consumer price inflation.

Money Is Not Neutral

Additional money does not raise every price by the same proportion, leaving the underlying structure of the economy untouched. It enters the economy at specific points – through banks, credit markets, and the institutions that first receive newly created liquidity – and its effects ripple outward unevenly from there. By the time new money reaches the people, higher prices have already consumed its extra value. Austrian economists, like Haberler’s contemporary Friedrich Hayek, have long described this with the Cantillon effect. In an economy where basic consumption needs are largely saturated for a large share of households, additional liquidity is more likely to flow into savings and investment vehicles, such as stocks and real estate, than into proportionally higher demand for groceries and clothing.

That is precisely the pattern in the data. The monetary overhang that opened up after 1995 lines up closely with the period over which stocks and home prices pulled away from the CPI. None of this proves a single, simple causal explanation. Asset prices respond to many forces, from productivity growth to demographics to global capital flows. But a persistent, multi-decade gap between money creation on the one hand and real growth plus consumer price inflation on the other is exactly the kind of monetary overhang that should show up somewhere. In a consumption-saturated economy, the most likely place for it to show up is in the price of the assets the CPI was never built to measure.

That leaves conventional inflation measures with two blind spots stacked on top of each other. The CPI omits the government-financed consumption taxpayers cannot opt out of, and it omits the asset-price inflation driving the widening gap between those who already own homes and stocks and those still trying to buy in. Neither omission is a flaw in how the CPI is calculated. Both are consequences of what the CPI was, by its own underlying economic theory, never designed to measure.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has again responded to allegations of European officials that Moscow seeks to expand the war beyond Ukraine.

We earlier detailed how recent drone spillover from the conflict, including explosive-laden drones coming out of Belarusian territory and threatening the Baltics, has resulted in Western officials increasingly alluding to NATO ‘collective defense’.

This is highly dangerous as it means the situation could rapidly escalate into full-blown Russia-NATO direct confrontation on the basis of a single aircraft shootdown.

In his fresh remarks from Ekaterinburg, Russia – where he was addressing the International Youth Festival on Wednesday, FM Lavrov made clear that Russia has not intent of ever attacking Europe.

But he coupled the statement with a very severe and ominous warning, that could have nuclear implications.

“I would like to emphasize that we have no interest in engaging in this [attacking Europe], but if Europe, which is talking about preparing for war against Russia on a daily basis, attacks Russia, it will be a completely different war, and it will be very short,” Lavrov said in remarks translated by national media.

According to more:

The minister also expressed the hope that Europe had heard the warning about a short war in the event of an attack on Russia.

Sergey Lavrov expressed doubts regarding the idea that the world is being governed based solely on agreements between the United States and China, noting that China has a completely different approach to global affairs.

Again, though not expressly stated, Lavrov’s warning hints a using nuclear weapons – given the emphasis on such a conflict being “short”.

Reading between the lines, he is saying that while Russia doesn’t want to go to war with Europe, the only scenario where that would be possible is if Russia is under direct attack and deems its existential survival at stake. Such a thresh-hold reached would likely justify use of strategic forces if President Putin made the decision. 

What’s different or curious about the veiled Lavrov warning is that it is typically the ‘hawk’ Dmitry Medvedev making them. The former Russian president and current Deputy Chairman of the Security Council is typically the one making such maximalist warnings.

All of this suggests the Kremlin sees escalation with NATO in the atmosphere, which it authentically doesn’t seem to want.