Now amid a days-long internet blackout which stretches to last week, Iranians are being offered free Starlink satellite service by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. 

“SpaceX has waived the Starlink subscription fee in Iran, so people with receivers in the country can access service without paying, according to Ahmad Ahmadian, executive director of the US group Holistic Resilience, which works with Iranians to secure Internet access,” Bloomberg reports Tuesday.”A person familiar with Starlink’s operations confirmed the free ser vice, while asking not to be identified because the information isn’t public,” the report says further.

Word of this comes after earlier the same day President Trump encouraged Iranians to mount a coup and attack government buildings and institutions. In a serious escalation of his Iran rhetoric, Trump posted to Truth Social earlier, “To all Iranian patriots: keep protesting. Take over your institutions if possible. And save the names of the killers and the abusers that are abusing you.”

What started as economically-driven protests in Tehran marketplaces last month threatens to become a full-blown insurgency targeting police and government buildings, amid some reports that over 100 security personnel have died.

Western press accounts have focused on the allegedly hundreds of protesters killed, with some highly dubious sources on Tuesday going so far as to claim 12,000 demonstrators have been killed.

But what hasn’t been a focus is that semi-official Tasnim News Agency is claiming that at least 109 security personnel have lost their lives.

“The servicemen were martyred after swarms of violent rioters attacked them by firing bullets and hitting the law enforcement forces with various weapons,” said the commander of the special forces General Masoud Mosaddeq, as quoted in the outlet.

Various external forces have tried to hijack the protests, amid Israel’s Mossad also boasting its agents have infiltrated and are influencing events on the ground. So obviously, there’s a raging info war of competing narratives – just like with the Syria and Libyan regime change wars before.

Starlink will supposedly help video from on the ground get out of the country, but such info could also be driven by foreign NGOs (or else foreign governments). The Wall Street Journal freshly reports:

With the government shutting down the internet and throttling phone services, Iranians are leaning heavily on Elon Musk’s Starlink service to share videos of growing protests and the regime’s escalating crackdown with the world.

But Iran has intensified efforts to jam the service, which is banned in the country, and users are being hunted.

Over the weekend, authorities began searching for and confiscating Starlink dishes in western Tehran, said Amir Rashidi, director of digital rights and security at Miaan Group, a U.S. nonprofit opposed to internet censorship.

“It’s electronic warfare,” Rashidi said. He said disruptions are worst in parts of Tehran where protests are taking place and in the evening, when the demonstrators gather.

The battle over information—while secondary to the confrontations taking place nightly in dozens of cities across Iran—has potentially serious consequences. President Trump has threatened to intervene in response to a crackdown by the regime.

But this can go the other way as well. Plenty of videos have surfaced which purport to show Iranian security officers being assassinated, beaten or stabbed by anti-government crowds.

Potomac, Maryland-based Clown Prince Reza Pahlavi has explicitly called for violent attacks on IRIB media facilities and its staff

He’s also called for targeting (read: killing) any government worker who does not quit their job and join the regime change riots https://t.co/5W9t4zP9WP

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 13, 2026

According to Iranian state news outlet Press TV, President Masoud Pezeshkian accused US and Israeli intelligence agencies of training armed units, with that training happening both inside and outside the country. If outside governments are directly aiding the agitators, it wouldn’t be the first time that technique was used in an attempt to impose regime change on Iran. In 1953, US and British intelligence engineered a coup d’etat that ousted Iran’s democratically-elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. “Operation Ajax” involved the use of CIA-funded Iranian agents and “rented” crowds of anti-government demonstrators.

Tehran is likely to seize on these reports of SpaceX offering free Starlink access and assistance, in order to further accuse the West of waging a covert campaign aimed at destabilizing the Iranian government. Well and this covert foreign-backed campaign is probably already in full swing.

Authored by Kathy Barnett via The Epoch Times,

Minnesota did not wake up one morning and suddenly become a hub for fraud.

What Americans are witnessing—large-scale welfare and child care fraud, weak enforcement, political paralysis, and rising public anger—is not random. It is the predictable downstream result of decades of policies made by people who would never have to live with the consequences and who faced few personal costs for getting it wrong.

(L–R) Minnesota Rep. Kristin Robbins, Minnesota Rep. Walter Hudson, Minnesota Rep. Marion O’Neill Rarick, and former special counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice Brendan Ballou testify during a House Oversight Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Jan. 7, 2026. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

To address this moment honestly, several truths must be held at the same time, without flinching and without allowing the conversation to be deliberately mischaracterized.

First, the fraud is real.

Millions of taxpayer dollars were stolen. Oversight failed. Warnings were ignored. Accountability has been slow, evasive, or nonexistent. Individuals who committed fraud should be prosecuted. And when offenders are not U.S. citizens, deportation is not cruelty; rather, it’s the lawful consequence of violating the terms under which residency was granted.

Second, the public anger is real and rational.

Anxiety Rooted in Reality

Americans are not imagining their fears.

They are anxious about artificial intelligence displacing jobs, the expansion of H-1B visas amid stagnant wages, declining educational outcomes, extensive wars, and a cost of living that continues to rise. They are frustrated by leaders who campaign on reform yet deliver very little, even when they control the White House, Congress, and key agencies.

When citizens who work hard, pay taxes, and follow the rules see millions of dollars siphoned off through fraud, and then watch political leaders stall, evade responsibility, or gaslight the public, anger is inevitable.

That anger is not racism. It is a response to betrayal.

This Is Not About Race—but It Is About Culture

This is where the conversation is often intentionally distorted.

Exposing fraud in Minnesota is not about race or the color of anyone’s skin. But it is about ethnicity, culture, and behavior, as well as the refusal to speak honestly about assimilation.

Ethnicity is not skin color. It is a shared set of cultural norms, values, beliefs, and behavioral patterns. And yes, the fraud in Minnesota appears to be highly concentrated within a specific ethnic community, one originating from a country defined by state collapse, clan rule, tribal allegiance, and chronic instability.

That observation is not a moral judgment. It is a sociological fact.

Culture Matters in a High-Trust Society

Somalia has been a failed state for decades. It is not governed by durable institutions, but by informal clan networks and survival incentives shaped by chaos.

When large numbers of people from such an environment are resettled into a high-trust society—one built on compliance, enforcement, and shared civic norms—without firm assimilation requirements, the outcome should not surprise anyone.

In addition to being exploited by malevolent political actors and nongovernmental organizations seeking power or funding, some Somali communities resettled from high-chaos environments can consolidate into self-contained enclaves, effectively recreating aspects of a failed state within a high-trust American society. In such settings, tribal loyalties may replace civic obligation, informal networks may supplant the rule of law, and a weak cultural or moral attachment to America can make fraud against public systems easier to rationalize.

Chaos does not disappear when it crosses a border. It adapts.

Why Assimilation Must Be a Mandate

America is a high-trust society. It functions because a broad majority of its citizens share common expectations about responsibility and fairness. Americans work hard, pay taxes, and accept obligations alongside rights. They expect the rules to apply evenly and believe that although the system is imperfect, it is meant to reward honesty, effort, and compliance with the law.

That social compact only holds when political elites, their allies, and newcomers are held to the same standard as everyone else. Specifically, newcomers are expected—clearly and unequivocally—to assimilate into those norms rather than recreate the conditions they left behind. A high-trust society cannot endure if parallel systems replace civic obligation or if cultural norms hostile to rule-based governance are permitted to take root without consequence.

Compassion without assimilation is not compassion. It is negligence.

Accountability Without Collective Guilt

None of this implies collective blame. Collective guilt is imprecise and counterproductive, and it conveniently absolves policymakers, bureaucracies, and nongovernmental organizations that designed, enabled, or ignored systemic failures.

What is required instead is a disciplined framework that distinguishes between identity and conduct, as well as between population and policy. Individuals who committed fraud must be prosecuted. Noncitizens who committed serious fraud must face deportation as a matter of law. And the policymakers and institutions that enabled, ignored, or shielded such behavior must also be held accountable.

Blaming an entire community resolves nothing. At the same time, refusing to acknowledge clear and repeated patterns of behavior resolves nothing either. Accountability loses meaning when it is either indiscriminate or absent.

The Choice Ahead

The path forward is not complicated, but it requires resolve.

If the national response is to deny the problem, credibility is lost. If the issue is collapsed into race, clarity is lost. If public anger is redirected away from those with authority and toward identity groups, failure becomes permanent.

Leadership requires refusing all three.

This is not about hatred. It is about standards. It is about the law. Either a society enforces the rule of law or it allows each person to live according to whatever seems right to him. It is not about exclusion; it is about assimilation. And it is not about scapegoating; it is about accountability, both upward and downward.

If America wants to stop absorbing chaos, it must confront the decisions that created it, enforce the laws already on the books, quickly hold wrongdoers accountable, and insist that anyone who wishes to live here fully join the moral and civic order that makes the country work.

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

We have been warning about this for months…

In one year, this will be the most popular chart on this site pic.twitter.com/h93gWXMoNL

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 11, 2025

… and months….

between exploding electricity bills and lack of jobs for grads, a new luddite revolution is coming – they will be burning down data centers within a year

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 25, 2025

… and now that even the deep state spies at the WaPo finally catching on…

5 months later https://t.co/reP3n5lhfp pic.twitter.com/5Lg5pPiXl4

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 6, 2026

… the future finally caught up to the present, and last week we noted that according to Bloomberg soaring retail electricity prices have become a political issue in several US states, especially in PJM, the Mid-Atlantic regional grid, which as we discussed recently, is woefully under-energized.

“eight out of the 13 US regional power markets are already at or below critical spare capacity levels.” – Goldman https://t.co/YYAGUukfwR pic.twitter.com/eU4XPFAMrp

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 23, 2025

As Bloomberg said, paraphrasing us 5 months ago, “Power prices emerged as a a major campaign theme in off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia in 2025, and will play a big role in 2026’s upcoming national midterms and state elections.”

This is just the start: as we discussed over a month ago, data center power demand could reach a staggering 106 GW in 2035.  For context, the US had about 25 GW of operating data centers in 2024 (according to Bloom Energy). Which means that unless all these data centers somehow find “behind the meter” sources of collocated power, electric bills will, pardon the pun, go nuclear. 

A July report from the Department of Energy estimated an additional 100 GW of new peak capacity is needed by 2030, of which 50 GW is attributable to data centers. Those facilities could account for as much as 12% of peak demand by 2028, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Bloomberg’s conclusion: “Affordability politics have mixed implications for climate (renewables are cheap, but some programs expensive), and for data centers, which take the blame for rising prices.”

Overnight, Trump’s staff appears to have read our post again, and in a late night post on Truth Social, the president – addressing American voter concerns about rising electricity prices – said his administration had been in talks with one of the largest energy hogs, Microsoft, to ensure that consumers “don’t pick up the tab” for enormous data centers.

In a Truth Social post, he added that while the data centers “are key” to the artificial intelligence boom, the “big Technology Companies who build them must ‘pay their own way.’”

He said that Microsoft would make “major changes,” but was not specific. 

A few hours later, on Tuesday morning, Microsoft unveiled an initiative to curb water usage at its US data centers and limit the impact on the general population from surging in power prices.

Microsoft said it will pay utility rates high enough to cover its power costs and work with local utilities to expand supply when needed for its data centers. It also pledged to replenish more water than its data centers consume, saying it would start publishing water-use information for each data center region in the U.S., along with its progress on replenishment.

“Especially when tech companies are so profitable, it’s both unfair and politically unrealistic for our industry to ask the public to shoulder added electricity costs for AI,” Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith said in a statement.

The company said on Tuesday that as part of its investment in Wisconsin, it is supporting a new rate structure that would prevent data center power costs from being passed on to consumers. Microsoft will also train local residents to fill construction and maintenance jobs at its data centers, as well as provide AI literacy training to communities.

Political leaders across the U.S. are urging a rapid expansion of data-center capacity and new power production to keep the country competitive in AI. However, local communities are voicing concerns over how the power-hungry facilities will impact their utility bills and use land, water and other natural resources in the region.

But before you get the false impression that Microsoft is actually doing something out of the goodness of its heart and is not seeking the highest possible IRR, last night Microsoft made its true intentions clear when it warned that US AI groups are being outpaced by Chinese rivals in the battle for users outside the west, as China combines low-cost “open” models with hefty state subsidies to gain an edge.

Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, told the FT that the rapid adoption of Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek’s technology in emerging markets such as Africa underscores the competition American firms face around the world. 

“We have to recognize that right now, unlike a year ago, China has an open-source model, and increasingly more than one, that is competitive,” he said. “They benefit from subsidization by the Chinese government. They benefit from subsidies that enable [them] to basically undercut American companies based on price.”

Translation: the US has to subsidize its own AI companies (such as Microsoft wink wink) if it wants to defeat China in the new arms race. 

And while first OpenAI and now Microsoft are begging for US subsidizes and, eventually, bailouts of their AI businesses, China has already overtaken the US in the global market for so-called “open” AI models, which are often free to use, modify and integrate by developers. And, after a few years when instead of competing with China on the merits of technology the US hyperscalers are hoping for the US to eliminate Chinese competition, we fully expect China to overtake the US in closed models as well. 

Authored by Travis Gilmore and Jen Jekielek via The Epoch Times,

Federal officials are reviewing approximately $1.2 trillion in payouts to root out fraudsters, according to Kelly Loeffler, administrator of the Small Business Administration (SBA).

“Federal contracting and the fraud that happens within it in Washington, D.C., around these programs are probably the worst kept secret in Washington,” Loeffler said during an interview with “American Thought Leaders” host Jan Jekielek.

She highlighted patterns of fraud impacting the government, including the widespread abuse of the SBA’s 8(a) business development programs that offer funding for small businesses, including education and child care organizations, revealed in Minnesota

“It’s a huge cost to the American people when these programs are defrauded,” Loeffler said. “So, we have a whole path, we’re cracking down on that.”

An investigation looking back 15 years will include audits—the first in the program’s 45-year history, according to the administrator.

Approximately 7,000 borrowers—representing about $400 million in fraudulent payouts—were suspended in Minnesota last year.

Fraud Spread Nationwide

Officials will next use the investigative framework “to go state by state” and identify illegitimate payouts that were “very much driven during COVID,” she said.

Businesses asked to reduce operations—or shut down entirely, in some instances—were negatively impacted during the pandemic, which Loeffler said necessitated federal intervention.

“It was devastating, and would have been even more devastating had that federal assistance not come out,” she said. “And most small businesses were legitimate and used it for good, kept their employees on the payroll, and made a huge difference locally.”

Others saw the influx of federal benefits as a chance to reap rewards, which, combined with limited oversight, led to widespread abuse of the program, she said.

“There’s a certain group of actors that saw opportunity in disaster and defrauded the government,” Loeffler said. “What we know now is they come back to the trough.”

President Joe Biden’s administration forgave thousands of loans that were flagged as potentially fraudulent, she noted.

“They were not ever further investigated,” Loeffler said. “Those cases were closed; those loans were being forgiven.”

Federal investigators are now reviewing each loan to determine if further action is warranted.

“No more sweeping this under the rug,” Loeffler said. “We’re going to hold people accountable.”

Cross-Agency Cooperation

Fraud affects agencies across the federal government, with administrators from the Departments of Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services, among others, increasing audits and review practices. Leaders are coordinating efforts to better identify problem areas and solutions.

Contracts for social and economic benefit programs funding 4,300 organizations are under scrutiny after improper payouts were discovered, according to the administrator.

“There’s a lot of fraud in those programs,” Loeffler said.

The SBA sent letters to individuals associated with the organizations last year, with responses due back this month. Anyone who fails to provide financial details and other requested information will face penalties.

“We are going to remove them from the program, and we are not going to operate programs that traffic in abuse, waste, and fraud, and we’re not going to traffic in DEI,” Loeffler said, referencing the diversity, equity, and inclusion policies that President Donald Trump has outlawed through executive action.

Investigating Debanking

Officials are also looking into debanking practices—where individuals and businesses are forced out of financial institutions for ideological or political purposes.

“We understand that debanking is a real thing in this country,” Loeffler said, highlighting SBA efforts to investigate the issue, with approximately 5,000 letters sent inquiring for more information.

Trump and Loeffler were among many other individuals who had accounts forcibly closed in recent years, she noted.

“There’s discriminatory actions that are being taken,” Loeffler said. “To use the banking system to be a choke point for disfavored political people is abjectly wrong, and the president is reversing that.”

Supporting Small Businesses

The SBA was founded in 1953 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to guide small business development by providing access to capital through guarantees to lenders, consulting services, and opportunities to procure government contracts.

Loeffler said the Biden administration deprioritized the agency while overseeing a change in workforce logistics that saw approximately 90 percent of employees working from home.

“Well, particularly in the last four years, the SBA was dormant,” she said. “So sadly, our main street job creators saw a complete absence of the SBA.”

Trump’s focus on America first and reshoring manufacturing are an abrupt shift from prior administrations’ agendas, she said.

“Small businesses are really refueling our onshoring renaissance, along with President Trump’s policies,” Loeffler said.

Under her leadership, she said the agency is committed to guiding Congress toward deregulation and pro-business legislation.

“We’re here to empower the private sector and make sure that we’re getting out of the way, but yet making sure that they have the capital and the regulatory environment to build,” Loeffler said.

Humble Beginnings

A fourth-generation small farmer from Illinois, Loeffler’s path to Cabinet official started in the field at 8 years old.

The first college graduate from her family, she worked as a waitress in high school and college before launching her career as a financial analyst.

“I felt like, based on my financial acumen, I wanted to bring that to Washington, because I saw it completely absent when I was in the private sector, and being regulated and being told what we could and couldn’t do by people who didn’t know our business, didn’t understand free enterprise or fair markets or transparency or reporting or accountability,” Loeffler said.

“So that’s what I went to Washington to do, because I knew that as a farm kid, I owed it to every other young person who didn’t believe that the federal government understood them, that they had someone up there fighting for them.”

In a note out this week, analysts from Deutsche Bank led by Edison Yu said the global auto and mobility industry is entering a pivotal transition year, with 2026 shaping up as a major inflection point for both autonomous driving and humanoid robotics following the CES technology conference in Las Vegas.

“We attended CES in Las Vegas last week and sensed a meaningful surge in enthusiasm and relevance,” the analysts wrote. “Vehicle autonomy (robotaxi + consumer L4), and most notably, humanoids took center stage at the show, illustrating the spread of AI to the physical world.”

They said they expect self-driving vehicles to move beyond pilot programs and into full-scale commercial deployment, while humanoid robots transition from research labs into early real-world use. “Overall, we predict 2026 is a year where self-driving cars increasingly transition from testing/validation to scaling, and humanoids move from lab experiments to small deployments.”

The analysts highlighted the emergence of a new humanoid robotics supply chain, with traditional automotive suppliers repositioning themselves to serve what could become a massive new market. “While early innings, we see suppliers trying to pivot toward the humanoid supply chain in hopes of enabling large volumes in the future.”

Nvidia continues to dominate the computing backbone of this ecosystem. “Nvidia continues to be the dominant onboard processor seemingly due to performance and ease-of-use,” the team wrote, noting that most major humanoid developers are relying on Nvidia’s Jetson Orin and Thor platforms.

They also described a major shift in how robots are trained, away from rigid programming toward systems capable of reasoning through complex tasks. “There is a concerted move away from ‘pre-programmed’ or ‘scripted’ actions toward vision-language-action (VLA) where the robot ‘reasons’ its way through a variety of tasks.”

Commercial deployment of humanoids is initially focused on narrow, task-specific roles. “In the near term, we think the ‘general purpose’ humanoid is mostly being funneled into specific use cases to prove commercial viability before truly going into the home,” the analysts said.

Cost reduction will be driven by scale. “Increasing volume to improve overhead absorption was cited as the main cost driver,” the report noted, adding that one company on the tour has already reduced unit costs from $200,000 to $100,000, with a roadmap toward $50,000 as volumes rise.

On autonomous driving, the analysts said robotaxi programs are now entering a new phase of momentum. “With Tesla launching Robotaxi in 2025, we expect further commercial momentum from multiple players in 2026,” they wrote, citing expansion efforts by Waymo, Amazon’s Zoox, and partnerships involving Mobileye, Volkswagen, Uber and others.

They also pointed to Nvidia’s new autonomous driving platform as potentially transformative. Nvidia is “attempting to make it easier for automakers to deploy high level capabilities at scale” by providing both the “brain” and the “skull” of autonomous systems, reducing the need for automakers to build full AI stacks from scratch.

Among suppliers, the team said companies such as Aptiv and Visteon are entering critical execution years as they roll out next-generation AI-powered vehicle systems. In the case of Visteon, the company is “effectively democratizing the software-defined vehicle,” extending advanced computing and connectivity features into lower-cost vehicles and emerging markets.

Taken together, the analysts concluded that CES 2026 marked a turning point for the industry, with artificial intelligence, robotics and autonomous driving shifting decisively from experimentation into early commercialization.

Authored by Eva Fu via The Epoch Times,

After the U.S. capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro sent shockwaves worldwide, activist groups aligned with Marxist ideology and sympathetic to Chinese communist causes staged protests in America.

The same network of groups that fueled anti-Israel protests and the June 2025 Los Angeles riots against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has organized dozens of pro-Maduro and anti-ICE protests around the country.

One group, Answer Coalition, declared on social media an “emergency day of action” on Jan. 3.

The coalition’s national director, Brian Becker, after taking part in a New York protest, appeared in a segment on Chinese state media CGTN—a registered foreign agent with the Department of Justice—to condemn the U.S. move.

The United States, he said, “might be considered a rogue nation at this point.”

U.S. actions in Venezuela, he alleged, followed a pattern “where the U.S. demonizes … the leader of the targeted country, Gadhafi in Libya, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Milosevic in Yugoslavia … and then the U.S. goes to war; carries out unilateral acts of aggression.”

The groups’ focus expanded to call for protests against ICE following the fatal shooting of a protester, Renee Nicole Good, in Minneapolis on Jan. 7.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation, another group in the network, on Jan. 9 shared a poster depicting President Donald Trump as holding cash in one hand and oil in the other, with an ICE agent kneeling next to him. The poster showed the two figures encircled by red fists—imagery often used by communist and anarchist groups.

The activities of the groups are now facing scrutiny in Congress, with lawmakers pointing to their connections to a pro-Beijing U.S. millionaire, Neville Roy Singham, who lives in Shanghai and has appeared alongside Chinese officials in at least one forum that promotes the regime’s agenda.

“He is definitely someone that is anti-American in ideology, and regardless of where you might stand, even on topics like Israel versus Palestine, is funding certain groups that actually sow discord in this country with no efforts to actually resolve the issues, only to get us to fight one another,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said at a House Oversight Committee meeting on Jan. 7.

She proposed a motion to subpoena Singham and hold him in contempt of Congress if he fails to answer it. The motion passed after a voice vote.

Luna, asked about the motion, noted that then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) had pressed in July 2024 for investigation into the groups over concerns about “efforts by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its allies to sow discord in the United States.”

The lawmakers at the time named 18 groups in the network they said may have violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a U.S. law requiring public disclosure for individuals and organizations advocating for foreign interests, over their alleged ties to Beijing. The list included Answer Coalition and The People’s Forum.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) speaks at Turning Point USA’s America Fest in Phoenix, Ariz., on Dec. 20, 2025. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

Luna said she is following up on the matter.

“We have credible reason to believe that [Singham] is an unregistered agent of China in violation of FARA,” Luna told The Epoch Times.

There’s “absolutely a connection” between the network and “the anti-ICE riots that we saw in Los Angeles and across the country earlier this year, as well as the stuff happening in Minnesota,” she said.

It would be up to the Justice Department to decide the potential penalties if Singham doesn’t comply with the subpoena; regardless, the groups are done “playing their games,” she said.

Singham has sent money to the People’s Forum, one of the groups named by the lawmakers, according to a July 2024 Instagram post by the organization, which described Singham as “our friend,” and a “former Black Panther and life-long socialist.”

In October 2024, the Manhattan-based People’s Forum hosted a three-part course series on the Chinese Communist Party’s 75-year rule of China. The course descriptions said the regime’s founding in 1949 “ushered in a new era in China’s history” and praised Chinese socialism as a “unique model of socialist construction.”

A Jan. 6 X post from the organization proclaimed, “Our movement is fighting on all fronts,” including for “a free Palestine,” “to get ICE off our streets, and for socialism.”

The organization’s founder and executive director, Manolo De Los Santos, appeared at the World Trade Center on Jan. 8 with a bullhorn, leading a protest against ICE as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem held a press conference inside.

Some Venezuelans have said the protests against U.S. operations in Caracas don’t represent them.

“I think these are paid protesters probably from the CCP,” exiled Venezuelan Jorge Galicia, who fled political persecution in Venezuela in 2017, told The Epoch Times’ sister media NTD.

He said those who take part in the protests should go to Venezuela and see things for themselves.

“I have a really good friend who was put in prison by the Maduro regime in the middle of the night; they broke into his house,” Galicia said.

China and Venezuela have long maintained close relations. Maduro met with a Chinese delegation just hours before the U.S. raid in Caracas that captured him and his wife. He posted a video of their exchange online, saying it reaffirms the “strong bonds” and friendship between the two countries, a “relationship that stands the test of time.”

Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington on Jan. 8, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times

Jiang Pinchao, a Chinese dissident and writer, told The Epoch Times that the U.S. military action jeopardized the interests of certain communist and communist-aligned groups, prompting them to “cause disruption” in an attempt to steer U.S. society in a direction that’s favorable to them.

“These interests are at odds with those of the U.S. So of course they will use all kinds of ways to interfere,” he said.

Lawmakers said that although America protects freedom of expression, the groups agitating for Maduro belong in a different category.

“Free speech for American citizens is different than foreign states filtering their money through NGOs and the like to sway elections and to sow chaos into our country—that cannot be allowed,” Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) told NTD.

James Moylan, a Republican congressional delegate from Guam, said he considers the pro-Maduro protests “terrible.”

“There should be some restraints,” he told NTD. “We’re just trying to promote freedom, and they’re trying to kill it,” he said. “I think they’re communists.”

He said he sometimes sees such protesters on Capitol Hill.

“They’re right up into your face. I just feel for them. I wish they could just learn and understand,” Moylan said.

Cloud, who was at the Oversight Committee meeting, said he’s “all about continuing the investigation” into the foreign money. He said the committee will ensure “we’re turning off the spigots” on “these foreign influences that are coming to our country solely for the purposes of undermining our country.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to Singham, The People’s Forum, Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the Answer Coalition for comment.

Standard Chartered’s Geoff Kendrick raised his ETH forecasts in August 2025 to reflect Ethereum’s structural advantages, along with supportive regulatory developments and increased buying by ETFs and DATs.

The outlook has turned more nuanced since then.

In absolute terms, Bitcoin’s weaker-than-expected performance has prompted Kendricks to downgrade his BTC forecasts and push out our eventual USD 500,000 forecast to 2030 (also downgrading his ETH-USD forecasts for the next few years).

However, in relative terms, the SnanChart crypto guru thinks prospects for Ethereum have turned more positive.

He has therefore turned more constructive on ETH-BTC, seeing the cross eventually returning to the 2021 highs around 0.08…

Source: Bloomberg

Kendricks sees three main factors for ETH’s outperformance:

1. Flows

We think flows – via ETFs and DATs – are less important for ETH than for BTC, as ETH has a strong use case and fundamentals, whereas BTC functions purely as a decentralised store of value. However, flows still matter – and while they have weakened overall, they are more constructive for ETH than for BTC at present.

ETF inflows have stalled for both BTC and ETH in the past few months (Figure 2).

However, we think this is a temporary phenomenon rather than a change of direction (as we detailed in Bitcoin – Lowering our forecasts). Decision-making by investment committees takes time, so we expect the buildout of both the BTC and ETH ETF markets to take several years. Gold ETFs, the most relevant historical example, took about seven years after their November 2004 US introduction to reach a structural equilibrium that allowed flows to become more cyclical.

DAT buying of digital assets has mostly ended, in our view, following the late 2025 collapse in mNAVs (a valuation metric that divides corporate market cap by the value of digital assets held). DAT buying was enabled by mNAVs significantly above 1.0, which effectively allowed DATs to turn USD 1.00 into USD 1.50. However, a number of DATs now have mNAVs below 1.0, including MSTR (the largest BTC DAT) and SBET (the second-largest ETH DAT). These mNAVs failed to rise much even after MSCI announced on 6 January that it would not exclude DATs from its indices for now (mNAVs fell in October 2025 when MSCI announced its review on this topic).

However, BMNR – the largest ETH DAT – has seen its mNAV hold at around 1.1 or 1.2. As a result, it continues to buy ETH at a reasonably fast pace, as per Figure 3.

Indeed, BMNR now holds 3.4% of all ETH in circulation and remains on track to reach its publicly stated goal of 5%, the current pace of buying would suggest that this will be achieved by late Q1 or early Q2. Against this backdrop, DAT buying of ETH appears more sustainable than DAT buying of BTC.

2. Stablecoin, RWA and DeFi dominance

We are very bullish on prospects for stablecoins, tokenised real-world-assets (RWAs) and decentralised finance (DeFi) over the next few years. Specifically, we forecast that both stablecoins and RWAs will reach market caps of USD 2tn by end-2028, up from current levels of USD 308bn for stablecoins (source: Artemis) and USD 40bn for RWAs (source: The Block).

The majority of this will be done on Ethereum. Currently, 55% of all stablecoins and 52% of all RWAs are on Ethereum, according to data from Artemis and The Block (note that the RWA share excludes Figure’s private credit project on the Provenance blockchain – this is a one-off and is not indicative of future projects, in our view). We expect Ethereum’s shares to continue to grow as more TradFi activities move into the blockchain space, given that Ethereum is trusted in the TradFi world. Ethereum has been operating for over 10 years and its network has never gone down. While other blockchains may be faster or cheaper, reliability will always trump marginal speed and cost savings for TradFi operators, in our view.

We also see stablecoins as an important driver of Ethereum outperformance. The rapid increase in stablecoin transactions has helped push the total number of transactions on Ethereum to a fresh all-time high in recent weeks (Figures 4 and 5).

Without stablecoins, which now account for 35-40% of all transactions on Ethereum, this high would not have been reached.

A breakdown of blockchain ‘GDP’ also underscore the important role stablecoins are playing for Ethereum. On this measure (which adds up the fees earned by protocols from various sources), around 60% of 2025 activity on Ethereum was associated with stablecoin issuers – a far larger share than for competitors (Figure 6).

In addition to gauging blockchains’ sectoral exposure, the GDP measure can be compared to a blockchain’s market cap to create a P/E-type measure, allowing comparison both across different blockchains and over time (as shown in Figure 7).

This measure for ETH has been very stable at around 50 in recent years, suggesting that more activity – as measured by GDP – should result in a higher market cap.

3. Enabling greater activity

In June 2025, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced plans to increase ETH’s layer 1 throughput by 10x over two to three years. Since then, the Fusaka upgrade in December 2025 has enabled a further increase in both the gas limit (the amount of data that can be recorded per block) and the amount of ‘blobs’ per block (the amount of information that can be squeezed into each block, increasing total information per data recorded). Proactive steps are being taken to enable the planned 10x throughput increase (Figures 8 and 9).

Achieving this is critical to ETH price action. This, combined with a stable ‘P/E’ measure, accounts for most of the long-term price growth we forecast for ETH.

Other drivers of ETH price action

Another key premise of our constructive ETH-USD forecasts is our view that Bitcoin will reach a fresh all-time high (above USD 126,000) in H1.

This would defy expectations among some in the market that BTC is poised for further price declines at this stage of its ‘halving’ cycle; we believe the halving cycle is no longer relevant.

USD 126,000 is a long way from current BTC prices around USD 90,000; reaching that level would require US equities to remain strong, FOMC rate-cut pricing to increase, and the regulatory environment to improve.

Passage of the CLARITY Act is key in this regard; the legislation is currently moving through Congress and we expect it to pass in Q1.

Kendricks’ bottom line: While they lower their ETH-USD forecasts for 2026-28, in line with the recent reductions in their BTC-USD forecasts; they expect ETH to outperform BTC, and remain positive longer-term

China sharply criticized Washington’s move to levy tariffs on countries trading with the Islamic Republic of Iran, issuing a statement Tuesday – less than 12 hours after President Trump announced the punitive action on Truth Social – condemning the decision.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning stated, “China’s position on the tariff issue is very clear.” She said, “We have always believed that there are no winners in a tariff war. China will resolutely safeguard its legitimate rights and interests.”

The Chinse embassy in Washington also blasted the move, characterizing the US action as “exceeding legal frameworks.”

The United States will impose a 25% tariff on any nation conducting business with Iran. “Effective immediately, any country doing business with the Islamic Republic of Iran will pay a Tariff of 25 percent on any and all business being done with the United States of America. This Order is final and conclusive,” Trump had declared.

But this could have broader unintended consequences, and threatens to derail Washington’s fragile trade deal with Beijing, which remains Tehran’s largest trading partner. According to more of the Chinese response:

The world’s top two economies had secured an interim trade deal in late October that saw a roll back of punitive U.S. tariffs on China, while Beijing paused its sweeping rare earth export controls.

In response to Trump’s tariff threat China said it “firmly opposes any illicit unilateral sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction,” while warning that it would take “all necessary measures” to defend its interests, according to a post on X by a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in the U.S.

Deborah Elms, head of trade policy at the Hinrich Foundation, told CNBC that if Trump is serious about the 25% rate, “that is a massive escalation from current tariff levels.”

“The last time we played this game, we ended up with tariff levels at 145%” – she added, warning about the potential for a tit-for-tat spiral, which would further halt any future plans of US soybean exports to China.

Trump’s tariff decision comes amid violent unrest in Iran, described by Tehran as foreign-backed riots, which have left dozens dead – or possibly even hundreds according to unverified reports – including civilians and numerous members of the security forces.

China is Iran’s largest trading partner, by far. So because the neocons surrounding Trump want to overthrow the Iranian government, Iranian civilians get higher prices via crippling sanctions and American consumers get higher prices via US tariffs on Chinese-made goods.

We’re… https://t.co/8Ewc6Sk9vI

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) January 12, 2026

Since the unrest began more than two weeks ago, the US president has repeatedly threatened military action against Iran, pledging to “rescue” anti-government protesters. 

Iran’s national currency has collapsed to a record low, effectively losing all value against the US dollar. The economic downturn, driven largely by years of brutal US sanctions, has fueled widespread public discontent. But this street anger is also being ‘hijacked’ by external powers which want to see Iran destabilized, weakened, and it’s ruling clerics and leaders overthrown.

One week after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told the auidence at CES Las Vegas that AI data centers are creating a “market that never existed” for memory, the global leader in high-bandwidth memory, SK Hynix, announced that construction of a new $13 billion advanced memory manufacturing plant will begin this spring, with first production targeted for the second half of 2027, as it races furiously to keep up with surging AI-driven demand.

As Nvidia’s main HBM supplier, SK Hynix sits at the center of the memory supply chain and has become a headwind for AI data center growth. With HBM prices soaring, we have been documenting the key developments across the space:

• “Market That Never Existed”: Nvidia CEO Sparks Frenzy In Memory Stocks

• Soaring Memory Costs Sink Nintendo Shares; Goldman Says Selloff Is Buy-The-Dip Opportunity

• UBS Says Soaring Memory Chip Prices To “Turbo-Charge” Samsung Earnings

SK Hynix’s HBM is the stacked DRAM Nvidia uses on H100, H200, Blackwell, and every AI accelerator shipping through 2030. It’s easily half or more of the world’s HBM supplies, ahead of both Samsung and Micron.

Last week, Huang told the audience at CES, “For storage, that is a completely unserved market today. This is a market that never existed, and this market will likely be the largest storage market in the world, basically holding the working memory of the world’s AIs.”

Update: two months later https://t.co/Q4TPIrpzxV pic.twitter.com/O3KTKxZOVE

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 22, 2025

The SK Hynix forecast shows the HBM market is expected to grow at an average annual rate of 33% from 2025 to 2030.

“The importance of proactively responding to rising HBM demand is becoming increasingly critical,” SK Hynix wrote in a statement.

Chey Tae-won, chairman of SK Hynix parent SK Group, warned of tight supplies late last year. “We have entered an era in which supply is facing a bottleneck. We are receiving memory chip supply requests from many companies, and we are thinking hard about how to address all demands.”

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

As UK authorities ramp up their assault on free speech, a viral post shared by Elon Musk exposes the glaring hypocrisy in the government’s “protect the children” narrative. Data from the The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) and police forces reveals Snapchat as the epicenter of online child sexual grooming, dwarfing X’s minimal involvement.

This comes amid Keir Starmer’s escalating war on X, where community notes routinely dismantle government spin, and unfiltered truth is delivered to the masses. If safeguarding kids was the real goal, it would be the likes of Snapchat in the crosshairs, given that thousands of real world child sexual offences have originated from its use.

Instead they’re going after X because, they claim, it provides the ability to make fake images of anyone in a bikini using the inbuilt Grok Ai image generator.

If the UK government really wanted to ‘protect children’ They’d go after Snapchat, which is according to the NSPCC the platform on which more than half of all online sexual offences against children are recorded. X, meanwhile, is at 1-2% in those stats. https://t.co/76Azm2N3PG

— m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) January 13, 2026

Based on 2025 NSPCC and UK police data, Snapchat is linked to 40-48% of identified child grooming cases, Instagram around 9-11%, Facebook 7-9%, WhatsApp 9%, and X under 2%.

These numbers align with NSPCC’s alarming report on the surge in online grooming. The charity recorded over 7,000 Sexual Communication with a Child offences in 2023/24—an 89% spike since 2017/18.

Yeah, but what about fake bikini pics on X? pic.twitter.com/T4ui2DRpPc

— m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) January 13, 2026

Where platforms were identified, Snapchat dominated at 48%, followed by WhatsApp at 12%, Facebook and Messenger at 10%, Instagram at 6%, and Kik at 5%.

NSPCC Chief Executive Sir Peter Wanless stated “One year since the Online Safety Act became law and we are still waiting for tech companies to make their platforms safe for children. We need ambitious regulation by Ofcom who must significantly strengthen their current approach to make companies address how their products are being exploited by offenders. It is clear that much of this abuse is taking place in private messaging which is why we also need the Government strengthen the Online Safety Act to give Ofcom more legal certainty to tackle child sexual abuse on the likes of Snapchat and WhatsApp.”

Victim testimonies underscore the horror. Thomas, groomed at 14, recalled: “Our first conversation was quite simple. I was just chatting. The only way I can describe it is like having the most supportive person that you could ever meet. After about a month, the pressure started to build of him trying to prove that I was gay. That’s when he started sending explicit pictures and pressuring me to send images to him. I did send him pictures, but I didn’t like it and I didn’t want to do it anymore. He said he had saved the images and would send them to everyone if I stopped sending more pictures. There was a constant fear in the back of my mind. It wasn’t easy but I managed to block him on all sites and carry on with my life.”

Liidia, a 13-year-old from Glasgow, highlighted Snapchat’s risks: “Snapchat has disappearing messages, and that makes it easier for people to hide things they shouldn’t be doing. Another problem is that Snapchat has this feature where you can show your location to everyone. If you’re not careful, you might end up showing where you are to people you don’t know, which is super risky. And honestly, not all the rules in Snapchat are strict, so some people take advantage of that to do bad things. Apps should have better ways for us to report bad things, and they should always get updated to protect us better with the latest security tech.”

NSPCC’s policy manager Rani Govender added: “The scale and significance of these crimes cannot be underestimated. No justification for tech company inaction.”

Becky Riggs, National Police Chief’s Council lead for child protection, urged: “It is imperative that the responsibility of safeguarding children online is placed with the companies who create spaces for them, and the regulator strengthens rules that social media platforms must follow.”

A Snapchat spokesperson claimed: “If we identify such activity, or it is reported to us, we remove the content, disable the account, take steps to prevent the offender from creating additional accounts, and report them to the authorities.”

The NSPCC on grooming tactics noted: “Perpetrators typically used mainstream and open web platforms as the first point of contact with children. This can include social media chat apps, video games and messaging apps on consoles, dating sites, and chatrooms. Perpetrators then encourage children to continue communication on private and encrypted messaging platforms where abuse can proceed undetected.”

Sextortion adds another layer of terror, with the Guardian reporting a “shocking” rise alarming the FBI and NSPCC. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) logged 546,000 global reports in 2024—a 192% jump from 2023—with 9,600 from the UK in the first half alone.

QUICK… Protect the children… Ban X. https://t.co/M9MKV56fTn pic.twitter.com/BunwoS1B5G

— m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) January 13, 2026

Snapchat reported 20,000 cases of adults grooming children last year, more than all other platforms combined.

The NCA warned: “Sextortion is a heartless crime, which can have devastating consequences for victims. Sadly, teenagers in the UK and around the world have taken their own lives because of it.”

Labour’s child protection claims ring completely hollow against the backdrop of stalled progress on Britain’s grooming gangs scandal. Despite scandals in Rotherham, Rochdale, and beyond exposing organized abuse—often dismissed to avoid racism accusations—little has advanced.

A government audit last month admitted the “concept of ‘grooming gangs’… is not captured clearly in any official data set.” Parliamentary debates urge stepping up the grooming gangs taskforce, but as UnHerd notes, these “rape gangs started in the 1990’s and accelerated as the Blair government shoved woke down our throats and made everyone afraid of being called racist.”

Raising the issue now risks “hate speech” labels, silencing victims and enabling perpetrators. Vague accusations of bigotry are increasingly garnering more attention than the actual crimes. This cultural relativism has fueled hate, per experts, while survivors’ stories get rewritten to downplay institutional failures.

Starmer’s regime isn’t prioritising kids—it’s weaponising safety pretexts in an effort to crush X’s influence. The platform’s free speech ethos and community notes expose leftist deceptions daily, threatening their narrative control.

They want any excuse for censorship https://t.co/JrJcz8rsEt

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 9, 2026

As we highlighted earlier, US Under-Secretary Sarah B Rogers has warned “With respect to a potential ban of X, Keir Starmer has said that nothing is off the table. I would say from America’s perspective, nothing is off the table when it comes to free speech.”

She added: “America has a full range of tools that we can use” to bypass bans, like in Iran via Starlink. Rogers mocked Labour’s hypocrisy: if the government “cared about women’s safety, it would have acted differently on grooming gangs.”

As Starmer’s approval rating craters, threatening to fall into SINGLE digits, his desperation grows. But X endures as a beacon for truth, proving authoritarians can’t snuff out freedom without a fight.

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