China Produces “Baby Shahed” Kamikaze Drones For $500
China’s manufacturing base is now churning out short-range, low-cost kamikaze drones priced at under $500 per unit, which X user PLA Military Updates has described as “Baby Shahed” drones.
According to the post, the so-called Baby Shahed costs around 3,000 yuan (about $450), has a range of 20 to 30 kilometers, flies at roughly 200 kilometers per hour, and can be launched by hand or from a rack. These drones could even be launched from a box truck or shipping containers.
🇨🇳Chinese civilian drone company FLYControl recently develops a short-range, low cost “Baby Shahed” Drone.
The drone costs around $3000 RMB per unit, has a 20-30km range, flies at 200km/h, launched by hand or simple launch racks.
— PLA Military Updates🇨🇳 (@PLA_MilitaryUpd) April 7, 2026
PLA Military Updates said the Baby Shaheds are produced by the Chinese civilian drone company FLYControl. More importantly, the platform appears to confirm that China’s civilian drone manufacturing base has the capacity to produce not only these smaller one-way attack drones, but also larger, low-cost kamikaze drones based on Iranian and Russian designs that cost around $20,000 each.
These suicide drones have become critical in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war and the US-Iran conflict (currently at a ceasefire) because their low cost and maneuverability via swarming enable them to inflict severe damage on high-value assets, exposing a massive security gap.
The key lesson is that countries seeking deterrence will likely move to stockpile these drones in the millions. The U.S. revealed in recent weeks that it adopted Iran’s drone playbook and deployed a Shahed-style system against Tehran.
As low-cost drones proliferate on the modern battlefield, the economics of war are changing forever. Relying on expensive interceptor missiles to counter cheap one-way attack drones is not sustainable in the long run. That is why low-cost interceptor drones and more affordable counter-UAS systems are likely to gain significant attention from the Department of War, especially after the last six weeks exposed glaring security gaps at U.S. bases and even civilian infrastructure, such as data centers, energy plants, residential towers, and water desalination plants across the Gulf.
Parents who start raising a child in 2026 will spend around $303,418 from birth to 18 years old, according to a study published April 6 by Lending Tree. The cost increased 1.9 percent from last year.
The average annual cost works out to about $16,857 over 18 years, pushing this year’s estimate over $300,000 for the first time since Lending Tree began calculating it in 2023, the online loan marketplace reported.
Hawaii is the most expensive state to raise a small child, as yearly costs reached $40,342 for the first five years, the report said. Raising a child for 18 years in Hawaii is projected to cost $412,661. The next most expensive state is Alaska at $365,047, followed by Maryland at $326,360.
Parents in the Aloha State are projected to spend more than 27 percent of their yearly income on raising a small child. Nebraska and Indiana follow closely with 23 percent. In all, parents in 22 states should expect to spend at least 20 percent of their yearly income on raising a small child, the report stated.
Maryland at $36,419 and Massachusetts at $34,247 were the second and third-most costly states per year for young children. California came in fourth highest with a yearly cost of $33,692. Insurance premiums in California were the highest of the four top states at an average of $5,254 per year.
The differences between some coastal states are substantial. Raising a child in California will now cost an average of $312,300, compared with Florida, where it costs $280,280, the study showed.
States with the lowest annual costs to raise a small child were Mississippi ($17,148), Alabama ($18,019), and South Dakota ($18,622).
Florida ranked 27th with a nearly $25,000 annual price tag to raise a small child, while Texas ranked 45th at just about $21,000.
Costs to raise a small child rose by about 10 percent or more in 14 states from 2025 to 2026. In four of those states, prices jumped by at least 20 percent, according to Lending Tree. Those included Nebraska, where costs increased 27.4 percent, and in Montana (24.5), Maine (24.4), and Wisconsin (23.3).
The largest overall cost increases were found in rental costs, which jumped by nearly 50 percent, and girls’ clothing, which jumped by nearly 27 percent.
President Donald Trump, joined by Republican lawmakers, signs the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law during an Independence Day military family picnic on the South Lawn of the White House on July 4, 2025. Samuel Corum/Getty Images
Cost savings were found in a 10 percent increase in the child tax credit provided by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. This resulted in $200 in savings each year.
The annual cost for the first five years of a child’s life decreased by about $94 from $29,419 to $29,325, or about 0.3 percent, because of a small dip in day care costs, according to the report.
“Shocking Levels Of Distress”: CMBS Delinquencies Unexpectedly Soar To Covid Highs
With market focused on private credit as the next credit market crisis vortex, many have forgotten that CMBS, the asset class that was smashed in the aftermath of covid as hundreds of office buildings were suddenly left vacant, has been teetering on the edge for years. For some, it proved to be a lucrative bet as the “next big short” after various office-heavy CMBX tranches collapsed in 2020 and 2021. But due to the slow-burning nature of commercial real-estate deterioration, where data center REITs provided a solid offset to weakness elsewhere, credit markets eventually moved on to the next worst thing.
It may be time to reassess: according to the latest TREPP CMBS monthly report, March saw a surge in the delinquency rate, which jumped by 41bps to 7.55%, the highest in years, led by a surge in the lodging rate, a category which until now was not a source of concern.
TREPP states that the five largest newly delinquent loans accounted for just over $2 billion of the almost $5.1 billion in newly delinquent loans, including a West Coast hotel portfolio, a Midwest office loan, a Northeast retail center loan, a national hotel portfolio, and a Pacific Northwest office portfolio, which pushed the rate higher.
In addition, roughly 40% of the newly delinquent loans this month were considered performing matured balloon last month. Continuing the sideways delinquency trend as loans mature, go delinquent, cure, and become delinquent again.
Among all newly delinquent loans, non-performing matured balloon was the most common delinquency classification, consistent with prior months.
At the property-type level, four of the five major property type rates increased while one edged down slightly. Lodging posted the largest increase, jumping 137 basis points to 7.31%, the first time it has been above 7% since its recent April 2025 peak of 7.85%. Office rose 51 basis points to 11.71%, maintaining the elevated range established over the past year, but remaining below January 2026’s recent high of 12.34%. Retail increased 32 basis points to 6.62%, rising from February’s recent low of 6.30% but remaining below the higher readings observed in 2024 and early 2025, when that rate averaged 6.71%. Multifamily was also especially week, as the delinquency rate rose 30 basis points to 7.15%, pushing slightly above its prior high-water mark of 7.12% in October 2025, and well past its marks from one year ago of 5.44% and 1.84% two years ago. Industrial – a stable category which includes warehouse and data center REITs – dipped slightly to 0.65% from 0.67%, continuing to sit near the bottom of the major property-type delinquency spectrum.
And in an ominous twist, if loans past their maturity date but current on interest (classified as performing matured balloon) were included, the delinquency rate would register 9.07%, up 32 basis points from February. This figure sits 152 basis points above the headline rate of 7.55% and continues to highlight the role of maturities in overall CMBS performance. The seriously delinquent rate (60+ days delinquent, in foreclosure, REO, or non‑performing balloons) also increased, rising to 7.29% (from 6.89%). The percentage of loan balance in the 30-day delinquent bucket is 0.26%, essentially flat versus February (0.25%).
In a well-timed report, the WSJ yesterday published a reminder that much of the battered US office market continues to drag along the bottom, and continues to hold a fire sale, featuring some buildings marked down by more than 90%.
Some striking examples:
In Chicago, real-estate developer Marc Calabria bought a 485,000-square-foot office building for $4 million. The building sold for $68.1 million a decade ago.
Developer Asher Luzzatto paid a mere $5.3 million for the Denver Energy Center, after a foreclosure process. The two-building complex sold for $176 million in 2013.
Even the federal government’s landlord is getting in on the act. The General Services Administration last month sold a 940,000-square-foot building to a residential converter for $24 million, a tiny fraction of its value a few years ago.
Investors purchased 204 distressed office buildings nationwide last year, up from 133 sales in 2024, according to data firm MSCI. Sales of these properties, which were auctioned out of bankruptcies or sold through foreclosures and lender seizure, came to $5.2 billion. In the first two months of this year, sales volume of distressed offices was $808 million, up 24.5% from the same period last year, MSCI said.
The bottom line is this: we may be approaching the next commercial real estate crisis because much of the reserves that kept the sector semi-solvent for years, have run out. As the WSJ puts it, “landlords and their lenders held on to their office towers for years, hoping for a turnaround after Covid. Now, they are accepting enormous losses. Owners and creditors are capitulating to the reality that more employees are splitting their work time between home and office. They are also resigned to stubbornly higher interest rates, which lower property values and make it harder for buyers to borrow.”
“People who don’t know real estate would be shocked at the level of distress,” Luzzatto said.
Of course, not every office building goes for a few pennies on the dollar. These are mostly B-grade, or poorer-quality buildings, often in undesirable locations. And owners of high-end office towers in the best locations of New York City and the hottest parts of San Francisco are raising rents and selling buildings profitably (although pockets of weakness are appearing there too, now that AI is making a growing number of tech workers obsolete).
But most office sales reflect the sector’s steep decline. Even higher-quality properties on average have dropped about 35% in value from their peak, according to analytics firm Green Street.
Buyers, meanwhile, are picking up office towers in major U.S. cities for roughly the price of a three-bedroom condo unit in Manhattan. These distressed sales are paving the way for new owners to pursue redevelopment ideas that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
Calabria in Chicago plans to convert the office building into an urban farm and education center. He is working with Farmzero, which will use grow lights and hydroponic farming techniques to produce millions of pounds a year of berries, tomatoes, lettuce, herbs and other vegetables.
“The buy-in at this distressed price allows us the opportunity to afford change,” Calabria said.
Rock-bottom prices are also accelerating the move to residential conversion. Developers who bought at steep discounts can now justify costly structural changes – such as carving out atriums or reconfiguring floor layouts – that would have been financially unworkable at higher valuations.
At the start of the year, more than 90,000 apartments nationwide were in the process of conversion nationwide, up 28% from a year earlier, according to data firm RentCafe. New York City’s obsolete buildings are leading the way, but tax breaks and other government incentives are helping spark similar projects in Chicago and Washington, D.C.
This reckoning follows years when office owners and their lenders avoided confronting the sector’s problems. Owners would inject more equity, while lenders extended loans in hopes of a rebound.
Now, with many concluding that values aren’t coming back, lenders are increasingly demanding repayment or selling the properties, a sign that the office market’s long slide that intensified during the pandemic is nearing a bottom.
“We’re six years from the shock of Covid,” said Jim Costello, an MSCI executive director. “But that’s how long it takes someone to capitulate and give up such a highly valued asset.”
The good news is that the threat of systemic risk remains low for now: many banks and other lenders are better positioned to take losses after spending the past few years shoring up their balance sheets and building reserves against troubled loans. Special servicers overseeing distressed office buildings financed through commercial mortgage-backed securities are also selling. The Chicago building being converted into an urban farm was sold by special servicer CW Asset Management, which said the low price was justified because the empty building’s taxes, utility bills and other costs were so high.
It isn’t just weak demand from remote work forcing down values. Owners must contend with the high cost of leasing up empty space -through hefty brokerage commissions and tenant incentives – and uncertainty about how AI could reshape office usage.
Sharp discounts are showing up in both downtown and suburban markets. For example, Newmark Group brokered the sale of five suburban Texas office buildings over the past two years at prices more than 50% lower than prepandemic values. Buyers demolished them to make way for higher-demand uses like industrial space.
Some of the big buyers of distressed office assets include Cross Ocean Partners, a credit-focused investment firm known for moving from one pocket of distress to another. It recently raised the first $300 million of a $750 million fund to buy distressed office assets—both debt and equity—in such markets as Minneapolis, Austin, Texas, and the Boston area.
The strategy centers on acquiring assets at steep discounts and underwriting the cash flow from existing tenants. Even if office demand remains weak, those in-place rents can generate a profit.
While institutional investors have largely pulled back from distress to focus on the strongest buildings in the most resilient markets, high-net-worth individuals are stepping in.
Hossein Fateh recently bought a 940,000-square-foot GSA building in Washington, D.C. A data-center investor, he made a fortune when Digital Realty paid $7.6 billion for DuPont Fabros Technology, which he co-founded.
Fateh is planning a residential conversion, adding a swimming pool or atriums in the middle of the floors to create windows. Such architectural hacks will help push the conversion cost into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
If the price wasn’t so low, “this deal wouldn’t work,” he said.
And with AI set to unleash the next big wave of office vacancy, coupled with banks throwing in the towel on cash-burning properties, many more such deals are emerging on the horizon.
Colorado’s tourism slogan, “it’s our nature,” has a menacing meaning for free speech advocates. Colorado is now arguably the most anti-free speech state in the union, pushing an array of measures attacking those with opposing social and political views. The irony is that the state has proved a bonanza for free speech with spectacular legal failures that reaffirmed rather than restricted the First Amendment. Now, the Democratic legislature and governor are back with new unconstitutional measures, including a requirement that lawyers not share information with federal immigration officials as a condition for filing with state courts.
Colorado legislators and judges have spent years attacking core free speech and associational rights. In the last election, the state attempted to strip President Donald Trump from the ballot with the support of a majority of its Democratic-controlled state supreme court. (The effort was later declared unconstitutional in a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court. Colorado could not even get any of the liberal justices to support its actions).
The state is responsible for the efforts to force business owners to create products celebrating same-sex marriages. That effort led to the Masterpiece Cake Shop case and then the 303 Creative case. Even after losing earlier efforts against Masterpiece Cake Shop owner Jack Phillips, the targeting of its owner continued for years. That litigation proved to be a tremendous victory for free speech.
Colorado has also been leading the fight to limit the speech and associational rights of professionals and parents on “conversion therapy.” Recently, that effort led to another massive loss before the Supreme Court in Chiles v. Salazar, resulting in a resounding 8-1 rejection of Colorado’s position. It could only secure the vote of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
After that near-unanimous ruling against the state, Colorado responded by doubling down with legislation to expose any counselors engaged in conversion therapy to heightened legal liability, including waiving any statute of limitations. That case could also result in legal challenges as Colorado continues to spend a fortune on seeking to curtail free speech rights.
Now, the state is defending a new public accommodation law, HB 25-1312, that defines “gender expression” to include “chosen name” and “how an individual chooses to be addressed.”
As in past Colorado cases, the state secured favorable rulings from district court judges. President Biden-nominated U.S. District Judge Regina Rodriguez refused to grant a preliminary injunction against the Colorado public accommodation law.
The Alliance Defending Freedom is appealing the matter to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit on behalf of its clients, XX-XY Athletics and Born Again Used Books. Other appeals are also being brought in the matter.
At the same time, the state has moved forward on Senate Bill 25-276, which imposes a threshold condition for state e-filings that requires lawyers to certify annually “under penalty of perjury,” that they will not use “personal identifying information” from the system to help federal immigration enforcement.
The provision is vague on critical points in seeking to bar any information that might identify an individual or cooperating or assisting in federal enforcement. While the rule allows for compliance with federal law and court orders, it is leaves considerable ambiguity on the scope of the rule.
It is common for courts to consider specific motions to seal certain information, but such motions must state a legal basis for such withholding of information in a given case.
Lawyers have already objected to the compelled endorsement of the state’s anti-ICE policies as a condition to their representing their clients, as well as a bar on cooperating with federal authorities.
The law will likely face an immediate challenge not only from lawyers and clients but also from the federal government.
The Colorado Judicial Branch’s page on the law previously posted a statement that “In September 2025, some users may have briefly seen a certification requirement appear in the system.” It noted that the Judicial Department elected to take it down “for further internal and external discussion regarding the implementation of the new statutory requirements.” However, it announced implementation in March.
It stated that the condition would apply to any “third party” with access to the system – “certain attorneys, LLPs, and, in certain case types, pro se litigants”with access to information that is not “available to the public online, in person, or through a records request.”
It added “We recognize that some people may be frustrated by the requirements of this new legislation,” but insisted that the “judiciary is required to comply with the laws as enacted by the legislature and has worked hard to make the process as easy as possible.”
In my view, the law is facially unconstitutional and should be struck down. Regardless of the outcome on these challenges, Colorado appears hellbent on maintaining its dubious status as the most anti-free speech state in the union. Citizens will continue to subsidize this effort to defend laws compelling or censoring speech.
Colorado appears to be working to create the same legacy on the First Amendment. The state motto, “Nil Sine Numine” (Nothing without Providence), is fitting. For free speech advocates, Colorado has proven positively a godsend in its string of losses in seeking to gut the First Amendment.
Trump Mulls Punishing NATO Allies By Pulling US Troops Over Lack Of Iran Help
The Trump White House is mulling ways to ‘punish’ NATO allies for not stepping up to support the US Iran campaign, and for staying on the sidelines after Trump’s repeat appeals to create a coalition to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
This could include pulling protective American forces, and US military hardware, from NATO partner countries. It would impact “certain” countries, reports say.
The Wall Street Journal writes in a fresh Wednesday report, “The proposal would involve moving U.S. troops out of North Atlantic Treaty Organization member countries deemed unhelpful to the Iran war effort and station them in countries that were more supportive of the U.S. military campaign. The proposal would fall far short of President Trump’s recent threats to fully withdraw the U.S. from the alliance, which by law he can’t do without Congress.”
According to more, “The plan, which has circulated and gained support among senior administration officials in recent weeks, is early in conception and one of several the White House is discussing to punish NATO.”
This isn’t the first time that Trump has heaped wrath on NATO and threatened repercussions for US allies, but the Iran conflict certainly marks Trump at his most insistent on this issue of NATO in effect ‘not returning the favor’ after years and decades of the US being the alliance’s biggest single funder.
“It’s quite sad that NATO turned their backs on the American people over the last six weeks when it’s the American people who have been funding their defense,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a Wednesday briefing.
She previewed Trump plans to have a very “frank and candid conversation” with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. This could mean redeployment elsewhere in the globe – or else bringing them home – for tens of thousands of US troops stationed throughout Europe:
The U.S. has around 84,000 troops stationed across Europe, though the exact number varies from military exercises and rotational deployments. U.S. bases in Europe serve as a critical hub of global U.S. military operations, as well as provide an economic boon to the host country through investment. Bases in Eastern Europe also serve as a deterrent against Russia.
The irony in all this is that there are elements among Trump’s MAGA base that would welcome this move. They might hail any development which lessens America’s penchant for playing the ‘police force’ of the globe and of Europe.
Is Starmer at the top of Trump’s list?
🚨WATCH: 🇬🇧UK Prime Minister Starmer on Iran:
This is not our war. We will not be drawn into the conflict.
Also, removing American soldiers from Europe could actually calm tensions with Russia over Ukraine. However, it remains unlikely that Washington would actually draw down from it’s ‘eastern flank’ posture.
When Poland made clear it would not lend its Patriot systems for the Middle East conflict, the Trump admin did not pile on much pressure after that, and seemed to understand the reality of the situation. It could be that the NATO allies are simply putting their nations’ interests first, given the Iran war has not gone as planned.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco was ordered by the California Supreme Court on April 8 to halt his investigation into 2025 election fraud allegations so the judges can review the legal challenges that his probe faces.
Bianco, a Republican who is running for California governor, seized more than half a million 2025 election ballots after allegedly receiving complaints from locals.
Then, last month he seized an additional 1,000 boxes of election materials.
Local election officials told the county Board of Supervisors that his decision to take the ballots was unfounded.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, asked the court to step in and stop the investigation, saying that Bianco did not have authority to take the ballots.
Bianco seized another 426 boxes of ballots last week.
The top court ordered Bianco and his team to “pause the investigation into the November 2025 special election and preserve all seized items.”
“Today’s decision by the California Supreme Court reins in the destabilizing actions of a rogue Sheriff, prohibiting him from continuing this investigation while our litigation continues,” Bonta said in a statement.
The Epoch Times has contacted Bianco’s office for comment.
Bianco’s career in law enforcement extends 30 years.
In 2018 he was elected as the sheriff, coroner, and public administrator of Riverside County.
Bianco entered the crowded California gubernatorial race just over a year ago and edges behind fellow Republican, Steve Hilton, in the latest Berkeley IGS poll.
Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who may be eying a presidential bid as he exits his current seat in January 2027, applauded today’s ruling by the court.
“Today’s decision is a victory for democracy and the rule of law,” Newsom wrote in an X post on Wednesday.
“This rogue sheriff chased conspiracy theories, tried to undermine our elections, and got the ruling he deserved. Trump and MAGA’s election denialism is a cancer, a danger to our democracy, and it must be stopped.”
Exxon Warns Of $6.5 Billion Hit From Iran War As Q1 Earnings Set To Print Slightly Below Consensus
In an early clue how the Iran war will impact energy earnings, ExxonMobil warned of a $6.5bn hit to Q1 earnings from the Iran war but said the bulk of this was the result of unfavorable timing for its accounting of hedging contracts, which would be offset as underlying transactions were eventually completed. The US supermajor also said that global oil and gas production would be 6% lower in the first three months of the year than in the fourth quarter of 2025 because of attacks on facilities in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in which it holds ownership stakes.
According to Exxon’s 8K filed this morning, Goldman calculated that the company’s adjusted EPS at the mid-point came in at ~$1.80 vs. consensus closer to $1.90 and Q4 levels closer to $1.71. As shown in the chart below, there was sequential improvement in Upstreamdriven by higher liquids prices, sequential declines in Downstream due to higher maintenance and relatively flat performance in Chemicals.
Volume disruptions at Exxon’s production and refining businesses would deliver a $400mn to $800mn hit to earnings, while trading losses incurred because of a failure to deliver physical cargoes hedged with financial derivatives would cost another $600mn to $800mn, the company said in a statement.
Separately, the company provided a number of strategic updates, including: (1) the Permian likely producing at 1.8 mn boe/d in 2026, (2) first gas at Golden Pass having been achieved on March 30, and (3) that the Middle East production negatively impacted Q1 Upstream volumes by 6% compared to Q4 levels, with the overall Middle East portfolio representing 20% of Upstream production (albeit a lower level of segment earnings). As an aside, the quarterly comparison was challenging given disruptions in the Middle East, and large timing effects, the latter of which are excluded for the purposes of comparison.
Exxon has one of the largest exposures among western oil majors to the Middle East, according to the FT, which accounts for about 20% of its oil and gas production and 5% of its refining and chemical capacity.
The company’s assets in the region include stakes in LNG joint ventures with QatarEnergy that were damaged last month by Iranian attacks. Exxon said two gas liquefaction facilities in Qatar in which it has an ownership interest accounted for about 3% of its 2025 global oil and gas production.
“Public reports indicate the damage will take a prolonged period to repair. Pending an on-site evaluation, we are unable to comment,” the company said.
But the largest hit to Exxon’s first-quarter earnings, worth $3.5bn to $4.9bn, is linked to the surge in oil and gas prices caused by the Middle East conflict and the accounting treatment of financial derivatives it used to hedge prices while shipping products.
The company said the negative impact on its first-quarter earnings was a LIFO “timing effect” that would unwind over subsequent quarters and result in net positive profit once the underlying transactions covered by the hedges were completed.
“This quarter’s earnings include an unusually large, negative timing impact associated with our trading programme and the temporary earnings impacts that result from how we account for certain trades . . . These are sound trades and the profitability that will result from them will be material,” said Neil Hansen, Exxon’s CFO.
“Because we are using derivatives, we are required to account for them at month-end prices and reflect the resulting impact in earnings at the end of each quarter. This accounting often happens well before the sale of the associated physical product is complete. As noted, this earnings mismatch always results in a timing difference that eventually unwinds itself in periods of rising price.”
Exxon said that excluding the unfavorable timing effects that would reverse over time, earnings in the quarter would be higher than in the fourth quarter of 2025.
Offsetting the timing effect loss was the surge in oil and gas prices following the start of the Middle East war on February 28 would deliver a $2.1bn to $2.9bn boost to first-quarter earnings.
Exxon shares fell 5% in pre-market trading on Wednesday to $154.70, as traders reacted to a two-week US-Iran ceasefire deal.
The Justice Department and FBI on Tuesday revealed they have conducted a court-approved technical operation to neutralize part of a network of small office and home office routers in the United States that become commandeered by a unit of Russia’s military intelligence.
Russian Military Unit 26165—also known as APT28, Sofacy Group, Forest Blizzard, Pawn Storm, Fancy Bear, and Sednit—is part of Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff and has compromised routers to execute malicious Domain Name System (DNS) hijacking operations across the planet.
They targeted individual U.S. military members, the U.S. government, and critical infrastructure in which the Russian government expected to gain intelligence.
U.S. Attorney David Metcalf for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania said critical data had been commandeered.
“In the face of continued aggression by our nation-state adversaries, the U.S. government will respond just as aggressively,” Metcalf said. “Working with the FBI—and our partners around the world—we are committed to disrupting and exposing such threats to our nation’s cybersecurity.”
Assistant Director Brett Leatherman of FBI’s Cyber Division said U.S. and global routers had been compromised and that the FBI will continue to use its authorities to identify and impose costs on state-sponsored actors who target the American people.
“Given the scale of this threat, sounding the alarm wasn’t enough,” Leathernan said. “The FBI conducted a court-authorized operation to harden compromised routers across the United States.”
The FBI operation, called Operation Masquerade, is the most recent U.S. action to undermine continuous Russian state-sponsored cyber threats that exploit everyday consumer devices.
Since 2024, GRU actors have attacked known vulnerabilities in TP-Link routers worldwide to steal administrative credentials. They then obtained unauthorized access to devices and changed their settings to redirect DNS queries to GRU-controlled malicious resolvers.
The actors set up automated filters to identify high-value traffic before intercepting it. The malicious resolvers returned fraudulent DNS records that appeared to be legitimate services, including Microsoft Outlook Web Access.
This allowed man-in-the-middle attacks on what victims thought was encrypted network traffic. The GRU was able to harvest unencrypted passwords, authentication tokens, emails, and other sensitive data from devices on the compromised router’s local network.
The operation included technical contributions from Black Lotus Labs at Lumen, Microsoft Threat Intelligence, and MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
“Operation Masquerade was led by FBI Boston. It represents the latest example of how we’re defending our homeland from Russia’s GRU which weaponized routers owned by unsuspecting Americans in more than 23 states to steal sensitive government, military, and critical infrastructure information,” special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston Field Office Ted E. Docks said.
He noted that the FBI employed cutting edge technology and leveraged private sector and international partners to combat the malicious activity and remediate routers.
Court documents from the case, filed in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, outline how the FBI developed and tested commands sent only to affected routers in the United States.
The commands revealed evidence of GRU schemes, reset the devices’ DNS settings to legitimate resolvers of internet service providers, and shut down the original unauthorized access points. TP-Link router firmware and hardware settings confirmed the operation would not interrupt normal router function or collect users’ personal data.
Legitimate owners can change the settings through a factory reset with the hardware button or by manually restoring settings through the router’s web interface.
The FBI has also been working with internet service providers to inform affected users.
Owners of small office and home office routers are advised to replace end-of-life or end-of-support devices, upgrade to the newest firmware, verify that DNS resolvers are the same as those provided by the internet service provider, and review firewall rules to prevent unnecessary remote management access.
The GRU’s Unit 26165 was the subject of May 2025 joint advisory from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, as well as international partners, describing how the unit attacked Western logistics and technology companies delivering aid to Ukraine. The campaign, dating back to 2022, impacted organizations in 13 nations, including the United States, Germany, and France.
In April 2025, French officials said a series of hacks since 2021 were the work of the same GRU unit.
“The Russian military intelligence service (GRU) has been deploying a cyber-offensive modus operandi called APT28 against France for several years. It has targeted around 10 French entities since 2021,” Jean-Noël Barrot, the French foreign minister, wrote on social media platform X.
In a February 2024 disruption, the Justice Department took apart a GRU-controlled botnet that had attacked hundreds of small or home office routers around the world with malware. The FBI used the same malware to copy and delete stolen data while changing firewall rules to ban remote management access.
Sen. Graham Urges Congressional Iran Vote…On Approving Peace, Not War
This is definitely in you really can’t make this up(!) territory… Sen. Lindsey Graham is actually calling for a Congressional vote, but not concerning a War Powers Resolution.
Instead, he has called for Congress to review and vote on any diplomatic agreement ending the war with what he described as the “Iranian terrorist regime.” That’s right, the NeoCon senator from South Carolina only wants a Congressional vote on whether peace should be approved. He has remained opposed to a War Powers vote.
In a series of posts on X, Graham stated that he supports a diplomatic outcome but insists any deal with Iran must undergo congressional scrutiny to ensure it aligns with his ownIsrael’s US national security interests.
“Like everyone, I hope we can end the reign of terror of the Iranian regime through diplomacy,” he wrote Tuesday night, and said that any agreement needs Congress “for a vote, like we did with the [former President Barack] Obama JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action].”
The Trump admin and Iran just entered a two-week ceasefire aimed at negotiating a broader settlement following over a month of brutal conflict which has chiefly focused on an air war.
Both sides are readying for direct, face-to-face talks in Islamabad. Trump has previewed that Kushner, Witkoff, and maybe even Vice President J.D. Vance will be there. Trump has said these will happen “very soon”. He told the NY Post on Wednesday:
“We’ll have Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, JD — maybe JD, I don’t know,” Mr. Trump told the New York Post over the phone. “There’s a question of safety, security.”
As for Graham, he has warned against premature conclusions about a deal and called for transparency. “At this early stage, I am extremely cautious regarding what is fact vs. fiction or misrepresentation,” He called for a “a healthy dose of sunlight” to be brought to the deal.
He’s also calling for all of Iran’s enriched uranium to come under American control.
Again a diplomatic solution to end the reign of terror in Iran is the preferred outcome. The supposed negotiating document, in my view, has some troubling aspects, but time will tell. I look forward to the architects of this proposal, the Vice President and others, coming forward…
“As President Trump said this morning, all the highly enriched uranium must be removed from Iran and handed over to the United States – the Libyan Model,” Graham wrote, adding that allowing continued enrichment “would be inconsistent with denying Iran a pathway toward a bomb.”
However, there’s an obvious irony to invoking the Libyan Model. After Gaddafi gave up his WMD aspirations during the Bush administration years, he was later by 2011 regime changed by the US and NATO, and bayonetted in the streets by Islamist ‘rebels’.
No Real People Were Polled: AI Is Now Fabricating What “The Public Thinks”
The other day Axios ran a piece that cited “findings” that a majority of people trusted their doctors and nurses. Turns out, those “findings” were completely fabricated by a company called Aaru – using AI (causing Axios to issue an editor’s note and ‘clarification’)Aaru uses something they call “silicon sampling,” where large language models (the AI) can emulate humans at a fraction of the cost and time required for traditional polling, the NY Times reports.
Silicon sampling isn’t polling. It is the outright fabrication of public opinion by machines – and major news outlets and research firms are now publishing those fabrications as legitimate findings.
This is not an isolated slip. The technology is being embraced by some of the biggest names in media, polling, and corporate research. Gallup has partnered with the startup Simile to create thousands of AI-generated “digital twins” that stand in for real people.Ipsos is working with Stanford to pioneer synthetic data for public opinion studies. CVS, whose venture arm invested in Simile, is already using these fabricated insights to shape customer strategy. And outlets like Axios are treating the output as news.
The entire point of polling has always been authenticity – capturing what actual humans actually think (after oversampling your preferred party to make it look like as if people like Hillary Clinton).
That process is imperfect and messy. Let’s say a pollster wants to learn how many people in the United States are in favor of a certain policy measure, but the pollster ends up with a survey that includes 80 percent Republicans and only 20 percent Democrats. The pollster may think that in reality the country is closer to a 50-50 split, so the results are rebalanced to reflect that perceived reality. This means that the percentages you read as the results of polling are the output of the model, not numbers from the actual survey data.
The problem is that every model is designed with its own biases, because pollsters disagree about which variables deserve more weight. In 2016, The New York Times’s chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, ran an experiment in which he gave five pollsters the same election poll data. (That included Siena College, which conducts opinion polls for The Times and first acquired the data.)
Mr. Cohn found a 5 percent range of difference among what the five pollsters’ models returned. That range was larger than the margin of error typically associated with random sampling, meaning that the modeling assumptions were meaningfully skewing the results. This is alarming, because it suggests that pollsters can use modeling to nudge polls in a certain direction and influence public opinion itself, rather than merely to report what the public thinks.
Walter Lippmann warned a century ago that democracy depends on an accurate picture of the public will. Traditional polling, however imperfect, at least began with real responses from real citizens. It was expensive, slow, and messy precisely because humans are expensive, slow, and messy. Silicon sampling removes every trace of that mess – and with it, every trace of reality. The models are trained on past data, tuned by the biases of their creators, and prompted to spit out whatever “representative” opinions the client wants to see. The result is not public opinion. It is a mirror of the assumptions fed into the machine.
Fake Polling Also Picked Kamala Harris…
On the eve of the 2024 election, Aaru ran a full-scale simulation that confidently projected a narrow victory for Kamala Harris. Market researchers now use these synthetic polls to decide product launches and ad campaigns. Policy shops quietly substitute AI-generated “constituent sentiment” for actual feedback. Each time a respected outlet or pollster presents these inventions as fact, they normalize the idea that fabricated data is good enough.
The consequences are already here. When headlines say “a new poll shows,” readers have no way of knowing whether real people were ever asked. Trust in institutions is eroding fast enough without handing decision-makers and journalists an unlimited supply of plausible-sounding fake data. Social science, political strategy, and market research risk becoming elaborate games of digital pretend.
