Authored by Mary Prenon via The Epoch Times,

Just as “The Obsolete Man,” which aired in 1961, depicted a future society in which technology had rendered certain professions obsolete, a recent survey showed that, as AI reshapes the workplace, most U.S. workers fear becoming obsolete in the future workforce and believe developing new skills is essential to job security.

While many workers attributed their fear of obsolescence to a lack of skill with the latest technologies, some hiring and workforce professionals said building interpersonal skills is increasingly critical, especially at a time when many young people are living in a digital world.

ETS, a global nonprofit educational testing and measurement organization, reported that 54 percent of U.S. workers felt underprepared for the next generation of jobs in the coming decade, compared with 49 percent globally. Meanwhile, 75 percent said they have no clear indication of what those jobs will entail in 2035.

This uncertainty, in turn, is accompanied by fears of obsolescence, with 58 percent of those surveyed saying they fear becoming obsolete in the future workforce. The figure rises to 74 percent among technology workers and 73 percent among those in financial services.

“The reasons workers give are consistent across markets: they lack experience with emerging technologies such as AI, automation or data tools. Many also report limited hands-on exposure to innovative systems that are becoming central to modern work,” ETS stated.

Some workers also feared that their newly acquired skills could become obsolete almost as quickly as they learn them, the report said.

Nevertheless, 78 percent of U.S. workers said there will be no job security without constant adaptation, while 85 percent said developing new skills will be necessary.

According to a March report from the International Monetary Fund, demand for new and digital skills is increasing, with one in 10 job postings in advanced economies and one in 20 in emerging markets requiring at least one new skill.

Ireland, Finland, and Denmark ranked as the top three countries in the organization’s Skill Readiness Index, combining high shares of tech graduates with strong adult literacy and retraining systems. The United States ranked ninth among the 23 countries analyzed.

Barriers

However, many barriers, including time, cost, access, and employer support, are limiting workers’ ability to pursue adaptation, ETS stated.

The report indicated that 71 percent of those surveyed were proactively developing new skills, falling short of the global average of 77 percent.

“U.S. workers are taking stock and waiting for clearer guidance, especially from governments, employers and educators,” the report said.

Research from Blu Ivy Group, a Canadian employer brand and recruitment marketing company with offices in Michigan, indicates U.S. businesses spent $102.8 billion on employee training in 2025, but many failed to provide additional time for training, according to Stacy Parker, the company’s cofounder and managing director.

“The biggest problem we see is that in many cases, employees are expected to participate in this training on evenings and weekends,” she told The Epoch Times. “They are so busy with different projects at work and are not given any time during the day to complete the training.”

Parker noted that in other countries, employee training is integrated into the workday.

“While North American companies tend to treat training as an HR [human resources] initiative, other nations see it as part of their competitiveness strategy,” she said. “Managers need to have accountability for developing people alongside technology.”

Meanwhile, Devin Hornick, cofounder and partner at KORE1, an Irvine, California-based nationwide staffing and workforce management company, said another reason U.S. workers lag behind their global counterparts is that they fail to discuss job expectations with their managers.

“In the U.S., the relationship between the growth of an employee’s skills in the workplace, combined with a career and income increase, is not clear, and employees will prioritize simply surviving the work week,” he told The Epoch Times.

Hornick added that unless an employer makes the relationship clear with a specific developmental career path, employees will not make the time to invest in developing a new skill. The issue can become more complicated, he said, when a company does not provide paid time off for employees to participate in training. Other companies do not cover the cost of training, and some do not offer training, Hornick said.

“Most professionals I place don’t have the bandwidth to take on additional responsibilities and build new skills,” he said.

“If there’s no budget set aside for employee development, that means there’s little to no value placed on training by employers and that results in the disconnect.”

Real-Life Skills Over Technology

Stacey Cohen, president and CEO of Co-Communications, a New York-based marketing and public relations agency, believes that job readiness should start as early as high school.

The author of two “Brand Up” books that guide high school and college students in personal branding techniques, Cohen stresses the need to develop interpersonal skills – even more than AI skills – to create career opportunities.

“It’s not just about knowing the latest technology,” she told The Epoch Times.

“What employers are looking for today are durable skills like communication, critical thinking, collaboration, relationship building, and problem-solving. Employees need to be adaptable, and this is becoming more critical than ever.”

Reviewing her own children’s high school curriculum, Cohen noticed a void in interpersonal skill development.

“They were teaching things like yoga and photography, but why not interviewing and leadership skills?” she said.

“Textbooks can prepare you for a test, but to succeed in the workplace you need a different set of skills.”

One factor affecting today’s teens’ ability to develop interpersonal skills is that they live in a digital world, she said.

“They text all the time and don’t necessarily have to speak to another human,” she said. “Even at the grocery store, you can choose the self-check-out lines instead of human cashiers.”

Cohen believes it’s never too early to teach young people these durable skills, such as using their own judgment, anticipating what people need, and learning the value of customer service.

“Even early part-time jobs like waiting tables require these types of skills,” she said.

Cohen noted that the hotel industry devotes considerable time to onboarding new employees. This intense orientation and training program reviews every aspect of guest relations, from initial greetings to problem-solving.

Cohen said businesses should adopt a similar onboarding method to not only create a smooth job transition but prepare employees for how the job may change over the next decade.

Erin DeVito, general manager of North America for Impact, a global learning and development firm, works with both executive leadership and employees to support and improve workplace dynamics.

“Even leadership is scrambling and trying to keep up with changing business strategies today,” she told The Epoch Times.

“The key is to help people develop skills of adaptability so they can shift, change, and learn new things. What worked years before may not be working now.”

DeVito and her team work with businesses of all types, industries, and sizes, offering customized leadership and team development, as well as coaching and other services. She said sometimes the solution can be as simple as encouraging coworkers to talk with each other instead of emailing.

“When we rely on email and text, we lose human connectedness,” she said. “While we’re all embracing emerging technologies like AI, sitting underneath those are real-life skills.”

DeVito used the example of her daughter, who was spending too much time texting on her phone and began to exhibit changes in her behavior.

“I took the phone away and put in a landline,” she said. “After just a day, she was talking with people and started acting like herself again.”

She eventually gave the phone back to her daughter, but with time-use restrictions.

Bridging the Gap

Hornick believes American workers can bridge the gap between the skills they bring to the table now and what will be expected in the next decade by setting the stage early enough with their immediate supervisors.

“I tell most of my candidates this: meet with your manager to find out what capabilities the company will need in the next 12 to 18 months and request a stipend, certification program, or protected time to develop those skills,” he said.

“If the employer will not invest, look at low-cost, credentialed resources that are recognized in your field. Waiting for the perfect comprehensive program is how people fall further behind.”

Parker said there’s still a “real paradox” with leadership in their ability to provide clarity when so much transformation is happening.

“Organizations are in continuous change and redirection, and often, employees have less confidence about where the company is headed and what will happen to their jobs,” she said. “Sometimes they think their jobs will be eliminated, but the company may actually have retraining in mind.”

In her experience, Parker has seen technology, corporate retail, and business-to-business firms undergo the most change and reshuffling.

“Employees often are burdened with heavy workloads, businesses are sometimes understaffed, and promotion pathways can be unclear,” she said.

As business leaders strive to find the best solutions, DeVito encourages both leadership and employees to learn as much as they can from everyone around them.

“It’s also important that leaders be honest when they don’t have all the answers,” she said.

The global push toward electrification carries several risks, including replacing dependence on foreign oil and natural gas with reliance on Chinese technology and critical materials, as access to cheap electricity dictates investment flows and where AI and industrial bases thrive.

Christian Keller, Barclays’ global head of economics research, co-authored a note Tuesday on how rapidly accelerating geopolitical fragmentation and surging power demand are rewiring the global economy. He argued that countries must secure traditional fuel supplies while investing heavily in electricity generation, grids and storage.

Keller identified China’s near-total control of more than 95% of critical material refining in areas such as heavy rare earths as a major vulnerability for countries dependent on those supplies.

Critical materials whose mining or refining China controls are critical inputs for electricity infrastructure, industrial production, the upcoming rearmament cycle, and the AI data center buildout. Replacing Chinese supplies requires far more than discovering new deposits and will take years. 

For the West, building competitive supply chains outside China, from mining critical materials such as tungsten to refining rare earths and manufacturing magnets, will be extraordinarily difficult and time-consuming. China’s dominance in the space is expected to persist through at least 2030 despite ongoing Western efforts to diversify.

“China’s quasi-monopolistic position provides it with significant geopolitical leverage,” Keller warned.

A Reuters report late last week revealed that some Chinese rare-earth suppliers were refusing to ship materials to US customers. The report suggests supply disruptions remain a major issue ahead of the Trump-Xi meeting scheduled for later this month.

Here is Keller’s warning for the West: 

Negotiating critical minerals supply chains

Electrification is only likely to advance as a global trend. Especially in energy-importing countries, being key for achieving energy sovereignty (next to lowering carbon emissions). In turn, that transition towards an electricity-dominated system is contingent on critical minerals (Transition minerals: unearthing opportunities from a $500bn supercycle). However, the global reserves of these minerals are often concentrated in certain locations: eg, lithium (over 30% in Chile), cobalt (over 50% in DR of Congo), nickel (over 40% in Indonesia). Moreover, the degree of processing is often crucial, potentially also making small reserves valuable, if fully processed.

In this context, China plays a crucial role, given its tight control over the global critical mineral supply chain and refining capacity, including graphite, gallium and rare earths (Figure 10 & Figure 11). China’s quasi-monopolistic position provides it with significant geopolitical leverage. Other countries also use export controls for minerals where they have dominant positions to gain strategic leverage, eg, Indonesia with nickel and bauxite.

Hence, critical minerals will likely play central roles in international negotiations about trade or geopolitical settlements. The US tariff concession to Beijing in order to retain access to rare earths and its plan to build its own rare earth mining and refining capacities are likely only the beginning . Efforts to re-shore minerals mining and refining capacity are also likely to take time, as shown by the persistent concentration of value chains projected out to 2030 (Figure 12). Potential conflicts over critical minerals access in some of the already unstable African regions are also likely. Australia could play an increasingly important role, given its abundance and diversity of reserves in critical minerals and rare earths.

The key complement to resources in the ground are the capital flows to provide the necessary financing. Here, capital-rich advanced economies such as those in Europe could try to increase their role. However, as Figure 13 and Figure 14 show, despite the industrial strategy efforts of governments in the West, building out a comprehensive and cost-effective ‘mine to magnet’ value chain decoupled from China is extremely difficult and likely to take time.

Overall, economic statecraft involved in securing critical mineral supply chains will become a mix of export controls, foreign investment restrictions, access to foreign capital, and sanctions, possibly project-focused and with changing alliances.

Keller’s warning underscores why we’ve made China decoupling a core investment theme, building on our nuclear theme, AI buildout, and powering up America themes, highlighting companies such as MP Materials and Almonty as the West races to secure alternative critical material supplies.

Breaking Beijing’s “quasi-monopolistic” grip will require operating mines, processing capacity, and reliable deliveries. Many junior miners still face years of permitting, financing and construction before producing their first commercial shipments. Companies that can bring supply online sooner could capture a crucial early market advantage, such as Almonty’s ex-China tungsten production ramping up in South Korea. 

Jefferies initiates critical mineral companies Almonty, Materion, USA Rare Earth and Neo Performance with Buy; the firms are expected to benefit from increased demand for supply outside of China.

Almonty (buy, PT $26.25)

Sees Almonty offering public exposure to Western tungsten…

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 2, 2026

The SPDR S&P Metals & Mining ETF (XME) has yet to confirm another breakout but certaintly coiling. 

Related:

• Ukraine’s Drone Warfare Devouring 4% Of Global Germanium Demand As China Chokes Supplies

For readers, the decoupling theme is about identifying miners already producing and able to close the supply gap. The opportunity lies in who can deliver first in size.

By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

China has paused approvals for new battery storage factories amid a review of existing and planned capacity, Chinese financial news outlet Cailianshe reported this weekend, citing industry sources.

The temporary suspension of approvals of plants that have not started construction yet comes amid growing concerns about overcapacity in the sector in the world’s biggest manufacturer of batteries for energy storage.

China is the world’s biggest market for electric vehicles and a top player in battery storage as well. But just like electric vehicles (EVs) and solar panels, these energy transition-linked industries have enjoyed years of generous subsidies that have allowed them to grow without any consideration of overcapacity and its consequences. The Chinese government has already had to clamp down on EVs and solar panels, and now, it seems, it’s the turn of batteries.

In addition, Chinese solar equipment manufacturers have diversified into battery storage to tackle a chronic oversupply in the panel and equipment market that has crashed many sector players’ bottom lines.

The surge in EVs and solar and wind power installations has resulted in excessive manufacturing capacity in these key non-hydrocarbon energy industries, igniting price wars that have hurt most companies in the sector, including the biggest solar panel manufacturers. Chinese authorities realized last year that cutthroat competition, overcapacity, and low-quality manufacturing are hurting enterprises.

The battery storage boom in China is now threatening this industry, too, and China’s authorities have started to take measures to curb unrestrained growth.

In July, China’s Ministry of Finance, the General Administration of Customs, and the State Taxation Administration announced that China would launch consumption taxes on batteries effective September 1, 2026.

Mercury-free primary batteries, nickel-metal hydride batteries, lithium primary batteries, lithium-ion batteries, and all-vanadium redox flow batteries will be taxed at 2% from September 2026 and at 4% from September 2027. Photovoltaic cells will face a 2% tax from April 2027 and 4% from April 2028.

China exempted new-technology batteries from the tax until December 2028. These include sodium-ion batteries, solid-state batteries, fuel cells, and advanced photovoltaic types such as perovskite, tandem and gallium arsenide cells.

President Trump has already attracted immense controversy when starting last month it became clear he is planning to hold Sept. 11 observances at the Pentagon, which was also struck. He’s not planning to attend the more traditional ceremony and venue in Manhattan for the 25th anniversary of 9/11 in part because he wants to deliver a speech, says the NY Times; however, the event organizers have long barred remarks, seeking to keep it non-political and non-partisan.

“The president’s interest in speaking on Sept. 11 was conveyed to memorial planners in recent weeks, three of the people with knowledge of the events said. But since 2012, politicians have been barred from speaking at the site,” the report details. “The National September 11 Memorial and Museum, which oversees the site, has worked rigorously to keep the venue nonpartisan and focused on the solemnity of the day.”

“Mr. Trump, a native New Yorker who talked often about the Sept. 11 attacks during his 2016 presidential campaign, is now expected to commemorate them at the Pentagon, two of the people with knowledge of the events said,” NYT continues. Vice President JD Vance is expected to represent the administration in New York. On Tuesday, President Trump just issued remarks sure to spark fierce controversy once again. Widespread reports have long documented that he was miles away from Ground Zero on that fateful day, but now he’s using language as if he was a victim or barely escaped, or as if he was so close to the action and tragedy akin to a first responder. In the below he seems to confusedly switch between settings – as is often his style – going from talking about his own claimed rescue efforts with a crew of responders, to then narrating a dramatic tale of “running” from the site as it was feared a building could come down on them. Watch:

Trump on 9/11:

Two firemen, big strong guys, and I’m not the smallest guy in the world, they grabbed me under the arm and said, ‘we gotta get out of here’ and they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. They… pic.twitter.com/1FgeFuhdfZ

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) September 8, 2026

ABC writes of the Tuesday venue where Trump spoke: “The event at the Ellipse was spearheaded by the Tunnel to Towers Foundation and showcased a massive, 21-foot, nearly 17,000-pound steel beam recovered from the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York, which had traveled for months across the country as part of the Steel Across America tour.”

Trump ‘recalled’. at the Tuesday ceremony: “The United States Steel Building [the former US Steel building, now known as 1 Liberty Plaza] was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is, it creaked a lot. It creaked.”

The president continued: “And I’ll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen, big, strong guys — and I’m not the smallest guy in the world — they grabbed me under the arm, said, ‘Got to get out of here!’ And they literally lifted me up.”

“This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself,’ but they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down,” he added. He may have even been talking about his own office and building(?), but the ambiguous account is made to sound like he’s ‘running’ from Ground Zero.

The NY Times has underscored further that he left the impression he had been right at Ground Zero:

On Tuesday, though, Mr. Trump left the impression that he had been at the site in the immediate aftermath. “I’ve never seen such an unbelievable mass of steel and, unfortunately, bodies and everything you can imagine,” Mr. Trump told the crowd, which had gathered to pay tribute to the police officers and firefighters who had been killed in the attack, including a stock trader and volunteer firefighter named Welles Crowther, whom Mr. Trump posthumously awarded with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

According to more background via the Times:

This was the latest in Mr. Trump’s evolving — and often disputed — account of his actions on Sept. 11 and in its aftermath, when he was working as a real estate developer in New York City.

Mr. Trump was watching television the morning of the attacks, which is verifiable from news coverage of that day, but what he did next has long been a matter of debate. He has repeatedly said that he took a construction crew with him to Lower Manhattan and was deeply involved in cleaning up the site, a claim that has been called into question by at least one former fire official who was involved in the recovery effort.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump renewed his claim that he had taken a crew to a building near the site where the World Trade Center had stood shortly after the attacks. He said that two large firefighters picked him up and took him to safety when he observed an unstable building.

…Reminds us of Hillary Clinton’s infamous ‘escape from Bosnia’ under fire:

This isn’t the first time he has given such a story: “News accounts from that time put Trump about 4 miles from ground zero on Sept. 11, 2001, and footage shows him blocks away on Sept. 13, 2001, and Sept. 18, 2001,” one investigation reviewed of prior claims. “None of those images or reports show him amid fire and ashes. And there is no record he was directly involved with first responders at the scene or that he sent hundreds of workers to aid the recovery. When asked, Trump has not provided evidence to corroborate the claims.”

People have been chiming in all day, providing their own personal anecdotes contradicting Trump…

I know this is BS because I was with him in his Trump Tower apt once. I was looking through his telescope. He said, “I watched the twin towers fall through that … it’s solid gold.” Those were his exact words and not a single word about going down there to help. https://t.co/u6y1nTkRpY

— Rick Reilly (@ReillyRick) September 8, 2026

That Trump’s tale was issued before a solemn 9/11 remembrance event is all the more shocking – and as an aside, is certainly no help to Republicans going into an already tough midterm election in November.

Authored by Christopher McFadden via Interesting Engineering,

John Hopkins APL researchers have found a way to dramatically speed up the way that carbon-carbon composites can be created. The new approach, the research team explains, could replace the current slow, labor-intensive process, ultimately slashing the cost of production.

“That speed is what makes FAST CAR² so compelling,” said Sal Nimer, assistant manager of APL’s Science of Extreme and Multifunctional Materials program. “It has the potential to enable faster and more efficient production of advanced materials for high-performance applications, whether for rocket nozzles or hypersonic vehicles,” he added.

Carbon-carbon, in case you are unaware, is basically carbon fiber embedded in a solid carbon matrix. Imagine carbon-fiber reinforced plastic, except instead of the fibers being surrounded by epoxy/resin, they’re surrounded by more carbon.

That gives you something that is simultaneously very light, mechanically strong and astonishingly tolerant of heat. It’s why you see it in things like rocket nozzles, re-entry systems, missile nose cones, aircraft brakes and hypersonic thermal protection.

Making carbon-carbon composites easier to make

“Carbon-carbon is one of the most important materials available for the thermal protection systems that help high-speed flight vehicles survive extreme heat,” said William Fahy, an APL materials engineer who co-led the FAST CAR2 project.

“It was crucial for the heat shield on NASA’s Parker Solar Probe – the spacecraft flying closer to the Sun than any human-made object. It’s indispensable,” he added. However, at present, making it is a painfully slow process.

Traditionally, you start with a porous carbon-fiber structure. You then need to fill all the tiny gaps between the fibers with additional carbon.

There are two main ways of doing that: repeatedly force carbon-rich gas through the material and deposit carbon inside it, or soak it with a resin and heat the resin until almost everything except the carbon burns/pyrolyses away.

The problem is that one pass doesn’t fill everything. FAST CAR2, on the other hand, makes this much simpler and faster. In fact, similar materials that take months to produce can be created in just days.

Instead of slowly growing or depositing the carbon matrix inside the fiber structure, they put a carbon-bearing material directly into the fiber preform and then squash and heat the whole thing extremely rapidly using a technique called field-assisted sintering.

Looking ahead

The electrical current produces very rapid heating, while the press simultaneously forces everything together. The actual densification apparently happens in minutes, although preparing the piece and completing the whole manufacturing process still takes days.

“We’re aiming for something revolutionary – to change the mechanism itself so we can get there orders of magnitude faster,” Chapkin said. “When we started, the theory was there, but we didn’t even know if the material would hold together,” Chapkin said. “We’ve been surprised every step of the way,” he added.

Looking ahead, the team is now working with external partners to access larger presses that will allow them to scale the process to even larger sample production and open the door to more applications.

“Scaling is always the hard part,” Fahy acknowledged, “but seeing how quickly this all came together and how successful it has already been, we feel optimistic about where it can go,” he added.

Summary

• US Strikes Iran: US forces reportedly hit Iranian oil tankers near Kharg Island and Jask.
• Iran Targets US Ships & Jordan: Iran reportedly launched another attack on US naval assets, though no American ships were hit, say US officials. Ballistic missiles raining down on Jordan overnight. 
• Oil Near $100: Brent crude surged as tensions threaten Iranian exports and the Strait of Hormuz.
• Houthis Hit Saudi Arabia: Ballistic missiles and drones struck Saudi energy and military targets, causing fires and operational disruptions.
• Yemen War Escalates: Saudi airstrikes resumed as Saudi-backed forces vowed to retake Sanaa, raising fears of wider regional spillover.

Iranian Missiles Raining Down on US Bases in Jordan: Reports

State Tasnim reports: Iran has launched missiles at targets in response to US strikes, while unofficial sources cited by Tasnim noted that explosions were heard in Jordan following Iranian missile attacks.

The below brief recap shows this new flare-up and tit-for-tat came in rapid succession… Senior US officials to FOX:

US military has struck targets near Kharg Island and Jask. The targets include Iranian oil tankers. This is part of a larger effort to squeeze Iran economically. The strategy includes sinking and disabling Iranian crude oil tankers. –FOX

Looks like a significant number of Ballistic missiles launched by Iran pic.twitter.com/yDSMvEPjb3

— Amichai Stein (@AmichaiStein1) September 8, 2026

How many Patriot interceptor missiles are being plowed through this time?

Interceptions of #Iran’s regime’s ballistic missile attack begin in #Jordan. https://t.co/VGlEWThsOS

— Jason Brodsky (@JasonMBrodsky) September 8, 2026

More unverified but widely circulating images out of the region overnight:

Insane footage shows the massive Iranian ballistic missile attack against U.S. bases in Jordan.

At least 30 missiles have been launched, and many of them also released cluster munitions while falling from the sky. pic.twitter.com/RM8XqcHBRw

— MoloMonitor 🇮🇹 (@MoloWarMonitor) September 8, 2026

Iranian leaders have lately vowed to hit US bases and assets harder in all forthcoming rounds of fighting…

This retaliation reflects what Ghalibaf stated a few days ago: that in #Iran‘s regime’s mind, the era of proportional responses is over. https://t.co/VxSVmwJZdh

— Jason Brodsky (@JasonMBrodsky) September 8, 2026

US Attacks Iran Tankers, After American Navy Ships Targeted

Oil climbed on reports of explosions on Iran’s Kharg Island:

IRIB reports that US forces attacked a commercial vessel in the coastal waters of Jask City

MULTIPLE EXPLOSIONS HEARD NEAR KHARG ISLAND ANCHORAGE, A KEY IRANIAN OIL EXPORT HUB; CAUSE, ORIGIN & ANY POTENTIAL DAMAGE REMAIN UNCONFIRMED. – MEHR NEWS AGENCY

US is currently attacking Iranian oil tankers, i24 news reports, citing a US source

A small Iranian tanker was targeted by a missile attack from the US army 4 miles from Kharg Island, Tasnim reports
Via Tasnim

IRAN LAUNCHED UNDISCLOSED SECOND ATTACK ON US SHIPS ON MONDAY: WSJ

NO AMERICAN SHIPS WERE STRUCK IN THE ATTACKS: WSJ

Fox correspondent confirms Iranian oil tankers (plural) and “targets” (plural) were struck by the United States in recent minutes. This does nothing to “squeeze” Iran, just to be clear. The tankers are inside the US blockade line and the Tanker for Tanker policy is just a… https://t.co/bwLrw9QO7v

— Brett Erickson (@BrettErickson28) September 8, 2026

Oil Climbs, Brent Near $100

Nothing official has yet to emerge, also amid unconfirmed reporting that Iran’s IRGC Navy has launched anti-ship cruise missiles from Jask toward the Strait of Hormuz. According to breaking Al Jazeera News:

Several explosions have been heard on Iran’s Kharg Island, according to Iran’s semi-official Mehr news agency. No official information has been released on the cause or origin of the explosions.

More from WSJ on the prior Monday attack incident: “No American ships were struck in the attacks, but Iran’s recent attempts to hit American naval assets are raising alarms that the regime is using more sophisticated weapons and could be getting assistance from China or Russia.”

But Trump claims the US is in ‘control’ of Hormuz and that the war is over. 

Heavy Yemen-Saudi Fighting Breaks Out

The heaviest fighting since the Iran war began is taking place in Yemen currently, also involving significant overnight attacks on Saudi energy and military sites by the Houthis.

The Houthis have since unveiled new operations, in a Tuesday statement saying the Iran-aligned group is targeting critical Saudi oil and military infrastructure. Widely circulating local videos suggest the attacks on multiple sites were in some case simultaneous and overwhelming.

“In response to this brutal aggression and in confronting comprehensive escalation with comprehensive escalation, the YAF carried out a large-scale … operation, targeting Aramco facilities in Abha and Najran, the Economic City, Aramco in Jizan, and Khamis Mushait Air Base, using dozens of ballistic missiles and drones,” said the Houthi statement.

“The strikes, by God’s grace, were accurate and direct and caused significant damage to those facilities,” it added. 

The kingdom’s Energy Ministry has indeed acknowledged fires and operations stoppages at several sites as a result, as well as damage and injured personnel.

Houthis Attacked Four Saudi Cities, Energy Installations

“Several energy sector facilities and installations in the southern region of the kingdom were targeted this morning,” the energy ministry stated.

“The attacks caused fires at several locations, leading to a temporary halt in some operations. Specialized field teams have begun containing the fires, securing the sites, and assessing the damage,” the statement said. Aramco sites have been targeted on multiple occasions this summer, resulting in operations halts, particularly at key sites near the Yemeni border. Damage is still being assessed at the Aramco Jisan oil facilities, which were targeted yet again.

Also military and supply missions were hit, with the Houthi statement also indicating the destruction of Saudi military equipment and convoys of Saudi-backed forces of the internationally-recognized government.

For anyone putting a lot of faith in those pipelines that bypass Hormuz…

⚡️BREAKING: Houthis have released footage of Striking Saudi Arabia’s Supply Lines to Pro-Saudi Forces in Yemen with Ballistic Missiles pic.twitter.com/b3JQ78LQrK

— Iran Observer (@IranObserver0) September 7, 2026

“Arms trucks coming from Saudi Arabia were targeted and caught fire at the Al-Wadiah military camp,” the Houthis stated.

In response later on Tuesday, Saudi airstrikes have reportedly resumed on Yemen in the governorates of Al-Jawf, Al-Bayda, Ma’rib, Taiz, and Al-Hudaydah. Already the death toll is mounting from these renewed strikes:

Houthi rebels in Yemen accused Saudi Arabia of striking a prison on Monday in the country’s north, killing seven, including a child, as tensions escalate between the Iran-backed group and Saudi-backed Yemeni forces.

The strike on the Central Corrective Facility in the strategic city of Hazm in Jawf province also wounded at least seven people, including a woman, said Anees al-Asbahi, a spokesman for the Houthi-run health ministry.

The prison’s warden told the Houthi al-Masirah news channel 35 prisoners and a woman who was visiting her husband were trapped under the rubble.

The Saudi side has meanwhile said that dozens were injured in the Houthi attacks. Major General Turki Al-Maliki, spokesman for the Saudi-led Coalition Forces, blasted the new Houthi aggression as “dangerous” and “senseless” – and announced that at lest 73 people have been wounded, including women and children.

🚨BREAKING: Yemeni Drone Strike Impacts Near Saudi Arabia’s King Khalid Airbase

Stunned lookers in Khamis Mushait film the attack.

This is part of the largest ongoing missile & drone attack on Saudi Arabia from Yemen in years. A retaliatory campaign after strikes on Yemen. pic.twitter.com/SO1YVgl92K

— MintPress News (@MintPressNews) September 8, 2026

Yemen Escalation

Both sides are now vowing escalation:

Houthi military spokesperson Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree accused Saudi Arabia of launching airstrikes and “committing massacres” in Jawf, as well as deploying a reconnaissance drone and supplying mercenaries with various weaponry.

“The ongoing Saudi aggression against Yemen will not go unanswered or unpunished,” he said.

The aerial war is additionally heating up: “Saree said later Monday that Houthi forces downed a total of four reconnaissance drones belonging to Saudi Arabia over the past 24 hours, including one that was spotted Monday morning in Bayda province,” as cited in The Associated Press.

Another test of the Mecca Agreement, which says an armed attack on any one of the three states will be regarded as an attack on all three. https://t.co/4V6lbh9LMN

— Jason Brodsky (@JasonMBrodsky) September 7, 2026

Oil prices on world markets continue to steadily inch higher, rising more than 1% as a result of Tuesday’s Saudi-Yemen escalation.

The Saudi coalition says it aims to liberate the country’s capital of Sanaa from the Iran-backed rebels. “The decision has been made to retake Sana’a. There are surprises we will not reveal now,” the Deputy Defense Minister Major General Samir Al-Sabri told state-run Yemen TV.

The Yemeni army further released a statement saying that “From today, we declare that our goal is clear and unequivocal: to liberate Yemen from the grip of the terrorist Houthi militias and restore Sana’a as a capital for all Yemenis.“

This appears a return to the kind of bull-blown war in Yemen which marked the latter half of the last decade. But this time it’s more complicated and dangerous in terms of regional spillover, given it comes in the context of the Iran conflict, the Strait of Hormuz crisis, and Houthi efforts to close Red Sea shipping to the Saudis, Israelis, and their allies.

Trump acknowledges 1) oil prices are high, 2) it’s because of the war with Iran, 3) the war has not ended, 4) the US has not won, yet. pic.twitter.com/gcsfqYmu0E

— Gregory Brew (@gbrew24) September 7, 2026

Below are more developments via Al Jazeera:

• Saudi Arabia has carried out new attacks in Yemen against al-Jubah district in Marib, in the Houthi-controlled part of the country, according to a news report in Houthi-run media.
• Forces loyal to Yemen’s internationally recognised government have launched a counteroffensive against the Houthi rebels, with officials saying they aim to recapture the capital Sanaa from the Iran-backed group.
• The Houthis say they repelled an offensive in al-Jawf, and at least seven people were killed in an air strike on a prison in the town of al-Hazm, pledging that the “aggression will not go unpunished”.
• Saudi Foreign Minister Prince ⁠Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud has described Yemen’s Houthi rebels as “selfish” for putting their own interests above the welfare of the country’s people. “The Houthis choose to prioritise their narrow interests over the interests of Yemen and resort to violence,” he said at a news conference in the Russian capital.
• Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has told his ⁠Saudi counterpart, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, in Moscow that Russia is ready to help resolve the spiralling situation in the Middle ⁠East.

Saudi-led forces in Yemen bombed Al-Jawf Central Prison:

#BREAKING

Saudi-led forces in Yemen bombed Al-Jawf Central Prison, causing death and injuries to at least 35 people. Terrible scenes#houthis #yemen #saudiarabia pic.twitter.com/sNBhWOZdaI

— METRONIDAZOLE (@METRO_NIDAZOLE) September 7, 2026

More Overnight News

via Newsquawk

• US President Trump posted, “Oil prices will drop precipitously, like everything else is dropping (but more!), when we WIN the war with Iran. Three Dollars a gallon, but ultimately, below Two Dollars a gallon. It will all happen quickly, and Iran will never have a Nuclear Weapon. MAGA!”
• Iranian President Pezeshkian said Iran has always opposed war but will continue to resist aggression with full force until the aggressors are made to regret their actions.
• Iran’s top national security official Rezaei said Washington has received a clear warning from Iran’s new missiles and that economic warfare will be met with a maritime exclusion zone across the Persian Gulf to the blockade perimeter, while he added that the operational posture toward US warships and bases has been fundamentally recalibrated.
• Tasnim analysis suggests that commentary from Iranian official Rezaei signals that Iran is considering expanding the geographic scope of its maritime confrontation into the northern Indian Ocean.
• Saudi Energy Minister said a number of energy facilities and utilities were hit and that some operations have been temporarily halted. This was later confirmed by the Houthis, in which they added that they struck the Khamis Mushait Air Base in retaliation to recent Saudi airstrikes. The group warned that further attacks on Yemen will be met with broader strikes on Saudi.

Right now, Chinese open-weight AI models are on the cusp of dominating closed-weight US frontier models in both price and performance. All ten of the top open-weight models on Artificial Analysis’s spring Intelligence Index came from China-based labs, and the best sat just six points behind the leading closed model; Chinese models also passed American ones in token share on OpenRouter in early June. All of this – despite asymmetrical lack of access to bleeding-edge hardware vs. their US competition, which Washington has been engineering since October 2022.

The first round of export controls went after Nvidia’s best AI chips and the tools that make advanced chips; later rounds added high-bandwidth memory and more of the chip-printing machines made by ASML, the Dutch company with a near-monopoly on them. This year the White House loosened on chips, licensing H200 sales that Beijing then capped on its own, while Congress moved on the tools: a bill that cleared House Foreign Affairs in April would bar ASML from selling its most advanced remaining machines anywhere in China and require a license for every service call on the ones already installed.

So – since China still can’t build the machines that make the chips, they’ve stockpiled three years’ worth of critical machinery – buying time for one company to spearhead a domestic drive for AI independence.

On Monday the Financial Times reported that Huawei has taken the coordinating role in China’s drive to build those machines itself, investing across the supply chain and pushing domestic tools into chip plants such as SMIC, China’s largest chipmaker. At the center of the effort is a scanner built by Shanghai startup Yuliangsheng, the same class of machine the bill targets. It is being tested at SMIC and on Huawei’s own production lines, and one source told the paper that output will reach 12 units by the end of the year.

China’s two major memory-chip makers, CXMT and YMTC, have already bought enough ASML machines to cover their expansion plans for the next three years. Meanwhile, Yuliangsheng’s would-be domestic replacement prints wafers through projection lenses made by Germany’s Zeiss, which says it sells lithography optics to exactly one customer: ASML.

China’s memory makers have banked three years of Dutch machines, and the domestic replacement runs on German glass.

What’s a Lithography Scanner?

A chip is a pattern printed onto silicon with light. The machine that performs that printing is a lithography scanner. For the chips that matter to China’s AI buildout, the relevant machine is an immersion deep-ultraviolet scanner (DUV), which passes light through a thin film of water to print finer features. ASML makes nearly all of them; Japan’s Nikon is the only other major player.

ASML’s newer extreme-ultraviolet machines have never shipped to China. Immersion DUV tools have, by the hundreds. ASML’s China president said in late 2023 that nearly 1,400 ASML machines were already installed in the country, and that number has risen since. China bought $49.6 billion of chip equipment in 2024, or 42% of the world total, much of it purchased ahead of another round of export controls.

SMIC uses those DUV scanners with multi-patterning, a technique that prints the same layer in several passes, to produce 7nm-class chips without EUV. That is how Huawei’s Ascend accelerators are made, including the 160,000 Ascend 950DTs that DeepSeek is ordering for its Inner Mongolia data center, covered here last week.

Every Ascend still traces back to a Dutch scanner. The machine Huawei is project-managing is meant to replace it.

Huawei As Project Manager

Yuliangsheng was founded in 2022 and spun out of SiCarrier, a Shenzhen equipment maker that FT has previously reported has close technical and business ties to Huawei. Huawei denies any affiliation. Yuliangsheng’s immersion scanner has been in testing at SMIC since September 2025, targeting 28nm in a single pass and 7nm with multi-patterning. For now, it is being used on simpler chips while engineers refine it. AI accelerators are the stated destination.

Bernstein’s Lin Qingyuan told the FT that “Huawei is playing a project management role in China’s DUV push.” A prototype, he added, is of limited value without the thousands of vendors, fabs and customers needed to make it reliable at industrial scale. Huawei is trying to assemble that system.

Its corporate venture arm Habo and another Huawei-backed fund, Shenzhen Yuanzhi Xinghuo, have invested in suppliers working on the two components China still cannot make at the required level: projection lenses and light sources. Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment, the country’s older state lithography house, is supporting Yuliangsheng with multiple prototypes, some built with foreign components and others used to test domestic substitutes.

The startup also sits inside a much larger state-backed effort. In late July, The Information reported that a Shanghai firm had begun mass-producing domestic immersion DUV tools, sending ASML down more than 8% intraday. Reuters identified the company as Shanghai Aishengna Electronic Technology Group. Founded in August 2023 with Rmb7 billion, or about $1 billion, in registered capital, Aishengna is backed by Shanghai Electric Holding and a Shanghai International Trust subsidiary and has absorbed teams from Yuliangsheng and SMEE. Corporate and recruitment records show that Aishengna and Yuliangsheng share a Shanghai address. Reuters had reported in December that China had also built an EUV prototype, though production remains years away.

German Glass?

A DUV scanner contains tens of thousands of parts spread across roughly a dozen major component groups. According to the FT’s sources, Chinese suppliers remain behind in two of the hardest: the projection lens and the light source.

• The Lens: Yuliangsheng’s projection lenses come from Zeiss – which told FT that it sells lithography optics only to ASML, which owns 24.9% of the unit – a stake it bought for €1 billion in 2017, and ASML’s filings describe Zeiss SMT as its single supplier of optical columns.

Huawei is now backing a would-be replacement. Fujian Zhiqi Photonics was spun out of optical-materials maker Castech in 2022. Yuanzhi Xinghuo paid Rmb100 million for 37% of the company in 2023, implying a valuation of roughly Rmb270 million, or about $40 million. Castech, which grew out of a Chinese Academy of Sciences institute, has disclosed both ASML and Huawei as customers.

• The Light Source: Japan’s Gigaphoton and ASML subsidiary Cymer dominate that market. Beijing RSLaser, also backed by Habo, has supplied light sources for SMEE’s older machines and is developing one for the 28nm tool. Lin’s assessment to the FT: building a light source is easy, building one that runs stably at high power is not.

The Fabs Vote With Dutch Inventory

While SMIC has bought Yuliangsheng’s machines and is testing them, it still uses ASML tools for production. Meanwhile CXMT and YMTC have stocked enough ASML DUV equipment to cover three years of expansion.

ASML’s CFO Roger Dassen said in July that China would remain at roughly 20% of 2026 sales, down from 33% in 2025 but on a larger base. ASML raised full-year guidance to €43-45 billion the same day. Its servicing and upgrade business, Installed Base Management, generated €2.76 billion in the second quarter alone.

Lin’s read is that Chinese DUV has improved substantially but still lacks the full backing of domestic fabs, much as ASML’s own rise depended on years of work alongside TSMC. The stockpile gives SMIC, CXMT and YMTC three years of expansion without running an unproven domestic scanner in production. It also delays, by the same three years, the production-line learning Lin says the prototypes need.

The MATCH Act

On April 2, a bipartisan House group introduced the Multilateral Alignment of Technology Controls on Hardware (MATCH) Act, H.R. 8170, a bill built to close the remaining gaps in US restrictions on chipmaking equipment sold to China and to make the Netherlands and Japan, home to ASML and Nikon, match them on a deadline. The original version was broader. A substitute offered later that month stripped out several controls but, according to Reuters, kept a countrywide restriction on sales of ASML immersion DUV machines to China. It also kept restrictions on foreign equipment sales to CXMT, YMTC and SMIC facilities already barred from using US tools.

The MATCH Act would also require licenses to service equipment in covered facilities, including calibration, spare parts, software updates and field support, although the revised draft dropped the original policy of denying those applications. The introduced text gave allied supplier countries 150 days to match US controls; Reuters reported that the substitute retained a deadline for allied negotiations before unilateral US controls would follow. House Foreign Affairs approved the substitute 36-8 on April 22. A Senate version, S.4281, remains in Banking. Neither has had a floor vote.

Immersion tools need specialized maintenance roughly every six months, often performed by ASML engineers on site in China. A three-year stockpile covers a sales ban. It does not cover a servicing restriction, which would put every six-month service visit inside a covered facility behind a Commerce license.

Lin’s closing point to the FT is that US restrictions could actually speed up China’s progress by forcing local fabs to work with local suppliers. Huawei can coordinate the suppliers, fund the missing components and put prototypes in front of SMIC. What it cannot easily do is make a fab abandon a proven ASML scanner while Dutch inventory is still available. The one party that could is Congress, and its bill has not had a floor vote.

The remaining constraint is the machinery underneath China’s models. DeepSeek’s chip order runs into Huawei’s memory shortage. Huawei’s Ascend chips run through SMIC’s ASML scanners. The domestic scanner intended to replace them still relies on a Zeiss lens acquired on China’s secondary market. And CXMT, the memory maker at the top of Aishengna’s delivery list, has just bought enough ASML equipment for three more years. Three years is the time Huawei has to make the domestic scanner work.

Authored by Mark E. Jeftovic via Bombthrower,

On Sunday, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland won Saxony-Anhalt, which shouldn’t really surprise anyone, but is being treated by the media like some kind of Black Swan event, blindsiding us all.

The AfD won 43.8% of the vote, more than doubling its result from five years ago and crushing Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU, which came in at 17.2%. Apparently, if it wasn’t for mail-in voting they would have had a majority.

As it stands, they’re within three seats of an outright majority (maybe they can follow the Liberal Party of Canada playbook and induce a few other MPs to defect).

Naturally, practically every headline describing the result contains some variation of the words “far right”.

We’ve been through this before.

A few years ago I wrote “What Does ‘Far Right’ Even Mean Anymore?” and came up with a working definition:

“Far right” is basically anything that contests the Establishment narrative.

That definition has held up remarkably well.

Because if you listen to the political establishment and its media organs, there are basically only two possible views around the problems facing Western countries.

The first is to double-down on what we’ve been already doing, irrespective of hard data showing that the policies of the last decade have made Canada the poorest performing country in the entirety of OECD nations, not to mention that the track we’re on will keep us there out until 2060…

On CNBC, Joe Kernen reminds Dom LeBlanc of some stark economic realities in Canada

“Minister LeBlanc, this is the last thing Canada needs. And I’m not sure whether you have a good feel for, for changes that need to be made in the economic approach of Canada.”

“The OECD projects… pic.twitter.com/YEyKacDVrY

— cbcwatcher (@cbcwatcher) August 25, 2026

Here in Canada that means some variation on the policies we’ve pursued since 2015, many of them mirroring the European model: historically unprecedented immigration volumes, an ever-expanding temporary resident population, increasingly cumbersome restraints on energy and resource development, and a kind of managed degrowth dressed up as environmental stewardship.

Door #2 is that anyone who has an issue with this is a “far-right extremist”, or more recently “a maple-MAGA”.

There is apparently no middle ground.

Stipulate that immigration is a overall a good thing but that the volume and calibre of the migrants matters? Far right.

Suggest that a country has both the right and obligation to decide who gets to live there and optimize for higher quality immigrants? Far right.

Expect that people who immigrate to this country should integrate into it, obey its laws and be a net contributor economically, instead of a perpetual drain?

Careful now. You don’t want to sound like you’re “noticing things”.

Which raises an interesting question after yesterday’s result in Germany:

When will there be an Alternative for Canada?

How Canada’s immigration system used to work

Canada was the first country in the world to adopt a merit-based immigration system, in 1967.

The underlying concept was remarkably simple: select for people who were likely to succeed here.

Education. Language. Skilled work experience. Age. Adaptability. Ability to support yourself.

There were family reunification and humanitarian streams alongside it, of course, but the economic immigration system was unapologetically selective and we unabashedly skimmed the cream across all ethnicities, countries, races and religions.

For awhile there, we had it: The Golden Age of Multi-Culturalism – and Canada was, in fact, a classically liberal paradise. For a while.

This is the system under which my parents, my wife, her mother-in-law, our daughter and my entire extended family came to Canada.

All immigrants. Most of them non-white.

It works fine.

For decades we brought in skilled, educated and motivated people from everywhere. While they retained homages to their cultures and religions, they also worked hard, obeyed the law, they opened businesses, raised families, integrated into Canadian society and, over a generation or two, became part of our “Canadian Mosaic”.

What Changed

That basic architecture continued for decades and eventually evolved into Express Entry, which was launched under the Harper government in January 2015. Express Entry actually made the selection process more competitive, ranking eligible candidates against one another instead of simply processing qualified applicants in chronological order.

What changed after 2015 wasn’t that Canada suddenly abolished the points system, but the Trudeau Liberals made changes to the volume and the pathways.

Permanent immigration targets climbed from roughly 250,000 to 280,000 annually during the Harper years to nearly half-a-million annually by 2024. At the same time, international students, temporary workers and other temporary residents expanded far faster (places like Conestoga College became veritable “diploma factories”).

And somewhere along the way, “temporary foreign worker” stopped conjuring up an image of an agricultural worker filling a seasonal shortage and started meaning practically everybody behind the counter at Tim Hortons.

The Temporary Foreign Worker Program was never designed as a mass pipeline for cashiers and fry cooks, but successive rule changes, plus a much larger companion program that does not require a labour-market test, made low-wage service jobs a normal use of temporary labour.

What makes it worse?

As many of those living in the GTA area are aware: home invasions are up, car thefts are up, assaults are up, so is firebombing Christian churches and anti-Semitic violence. The streets of Canada’s major cities are routinely taken over by Islamic and far-left extremists who openly hate this country and pine for it’s downfall…

Islamist in Canada: “I don’t consider myself Canadian, Canada is a racist colonialist project like Israel; they will be destroyed within 25 years.”

Canada is falling. pic.twitter.com/JakiJUTx3h

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) September 5, 2026

(One wonders, why is she here then?)

And when non-citizens commit crimes, get caught, get released again, commit more crimes, and eventually, finally are convicted…

The final catalyst: The immigration discount on criminal sentencing

This may ultimately be the issue that causes the pot to boil over.

Canadian citizens watched citizens getting tackled by cops grocery stores for not wearing masks, people got tazed at outdoor hockey rinks. The federal government imposed martial law and seized your bank accounts for donating to the Freedom Convoy.

And now, they open the news and encounter an endless procession of home invasions, carjackings, sexual assaults, human trafficking cases and violent crimes where some variation of the same phrase seems to invariably appear:

“The accused was already out on release for previous unrelated charges.”

…and they end up being released again, and people can’t help but notice, that many such cases turn out to be, “Brampton men” (IYKYK).

17 Accused in Peel Police Extortion Network Investigation Were Not Canadian Citizens

Peel Regional Police say 17 men who are not Canadian citizens have been arrested in connection with an alleged international criminal network known as “For Brothers,” accused of targeting… pic.twitter.com/h6IPYBe4BH

— Toronto Crime Watch (@CrimewatchTO) May 25, 2026

This has become common enough that Ottawa has finally had to respond. This year the federal government enacted more than 80 changes to Canada’s bail and sentencing laws, specifically targeting repeat violent offenders, home invasions, human trafficking, auto theft and accused persons carrying numerous or serious outstanding charges.

So the problem wasn’t some imaginary, shared hallucination that came out of a far-right echo chamber.

More corrosive still is the perception that non-citizens who commit crimes have been receiving so-called “immigration discounts” precisely because they are non-citizens and the Supreme Court, in R. v. Pham held that judges may consider the immigration consequences of a sentence.

This has lead to examples such as:

• A Kitchener man who battered his girlfriend was given a conditional discharge to avoid deportation to India
• An Ontario court of appeal reduced the sentence of a man convicted of assault and multiple probation violations by one day in order to prevent a “potentially devastating immigration consequence”. The Crown did not object.
• A foreign resident on a work permit who was working as a Bell Technician who exposed himself to a woman in who’s apartment he was servicing was granted no jail time because doing so would result in deportation. The man feels “stigmatized” and laments that he had to leave the area.
• Finally, this guy, who was caught in a Peel Regional Police sting operation, because he thought he was soliciting sex from a 15 year-old minor. He was convicted, then argued that his immigration status should not be impacted by his sentencing because he still wants to bring his wife to Canada (who presumably still wants to be with him, for some reason). Justice Paul O’Marra concurred,
  

  “A conviction could lead to severe collateral consequences, such as jeopardizing his immigration status, delaying his citizenship, and preventing him from sponsoring his wife, which would likely result in their separation”

Uh, yeah, no shit. That a conviction could lead to severe collateral consequences is the entire point of having a legal system.

The far-right extremist in me can’t help but notice, can’t restrain myself from wondering out loud…

Do we really want anybody here who can’t govern themselves accordingly before they even become a citizen?

Shouldn’t this be the most obvious filter available?

By all means, come to Canada, build a better life, work hard and follow the fucking rules.

Otherwise, don’t come, or get deported.

Too simple.

But try explaining the optics of that to a Canadian citizen who has just watched the state demonstrate zero reluctance to use its full powers against him and tell him that noticing the discrepancy makes him “literally Hitler”.

At what point does “far right” simply mean “normal”?

One of the more revealing moments in CNN’s coverage ahead of yesterday’s German election came when correspondent Fred Pleitgen described the AfD’s supposedly radical immigration platform.

‘The AfD openly calls for mass deportation of undocumented foreigners and foreigners who have committed crimes”

The CNN dude says “mass deportation of foreigners who have committed crimes” like it’s a bad thing. https://t.co/zvFjiKEMpV

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) September 6, 2026

Narrator’s note: “undocumented foreigner” is someone who is there illegally.

When a person enters your country as a guest, commits a serious crime against somebody who lives there, they should, as a consequence, lose the privilege of remaining.

Holding this opinion will get you branded “far-right” extremist.

I suspect a fairly large percentage of Canadians would consider it common sense.

Living in Canada should be considered a privilege for non-citizens, and citizenship should mean something. It should be earned through some combination of productivity, commitment, integration and time.

None of this has anything to do with race, religion, ethnicity, gender or sexual preference.

In fact, Canada’s old system demonstrated precisely how unnecessary those criteria are.

This is where the “far-right” branding becomes dangerous

The problem with reflexively branding every objection to the current system as “far right” isn’t simply that the label eventually becomes meaningless.

There is a much worse consequence.

For starters, you eliminate the legitimate middle.

People who simply say “immigration levels are too high” get called racists.

People who say temporary workers shouldn’t displace Canadian teenagers from entry-level jobs are deemed xenophobes.

People who think convicted non-citizen criminals should be deported are branded as extremists.

Eventually some of those people stop caring what you call them.

That’s when some truly unhinged egregores can arise.

I’ve been warning about this phenomenon for years, including in my book, Unassailable: when legitimate grievances are declared impermissible, they don’t just go away.

They go underground, they tend to mutate, and they resurface as increased polarization, siege mentality and, eventually, real extremism.

We’re already seeing the emergence Canadian groups openly espousing ideas that really are extreme, including ethnic cleansing, as though removing entire populations based on their skin-colour is the only remaining solution to problems the political system refuses to confront honestly.

Somewhere there has to be a rational distinction between “we need to go back to merit-based immigration, at numbers we can assimilate” and whatever the fuck this is. pic.twitter.com/EdJ3J6yFSW

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) September 1, 2026

As I lamented in my earlier “Canada Was A Liberal Paradise” piece, racism in Canada was for the most part, a thing of the past.

It was over.

Aside from the fringes and the individual Archie Bunker types, Canada was, for a brief, bygone age, a largely colour-blind meritocracy.

Then we made race central to practically everything again: post-nationalism, colonialism. Settlers on stolen land – this isn’t coffee house Marxism by purple haired they/them’s from affluent families anymore – it’s literally baked into the curriculum, it’s being taught in our schools and our universities by an academia overrun with Fabians and Malthusians.

Meanwhile, any criticism of immigration policy is synonymous with racial animus.

Is it any wonder that there are populist backlashes occurring in Germany, Ceuta, France, the UK?

The Alternative for Canada is not what you think.

I’m not here to tell you that some manner of nationalist, populist party is going to save Canada – I don’t even think the AfD or any of these reaction movements will “save” their own respective countries.

The reason is that I think this is part of a much wider issue: the collapse of the global debt-based monetary system and a Fourth Turning-style destruction of our Industrial Age institutions. The dysfunction we see here in Canada and abroad isn’t the result of the wrong political party or bad policy tracks. Those are symptoms of something much larger.

Populations vote in the wrong political parties, who embark on horrifically bad policy tracks, because there is no workable or tenable solutions to the current problems. Only emergent, alternative systems that are better suited to operating in world’s network-shaped topology and hyper-accelerating pace will persevere, and a big part of that is just staying out of the blast radius of the failing machinery (much more on this in my new book, The Blueprint: Survive and Thrive in an Overclocked Timeline – my premium membership already has access to it)

However intractable the problems of building a global financial system atop debt-based money, the situation is even more acute here in Canada, where the older generations still believe everything the CBC tells them, and the younger ones are indoctrinated to hate this country from pre-school onward.

In other words, Canada is cooked, and the “Alternative for Canada” is not having a different party in power, it isn’t having some establishment outsider like Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke entering politics (although that would be refreshing), or a firebrand like Kevin O’Leary taking over the CPC (which also would be awesome).

Nor is it becoming “the 51st State” or merging with the US (although anybody who’s ever read Dianne Francis’ book on the topic would find themselves agreeing with a lot of it. It was written before the rise of Trump and TDS infected the majority of the Canadian “Elbows Up” contingent).

For our cousins out in Alberta, it’s not even separation.

All of these things might forestall the inevitable, add a decade or two onto the long descent of The Industrial Age – but the real solution in an era where politics is just institutionalized grift and the masses are intentionally dumbing themselves down, the way forward is through radical personal sovereignty, critical thinking skills, financial independence, and optionality. Lots and lots of optionality.

The Alternative for Canada is you.

Authored by Ken Silva via Headline USA,

New York City has agreed to release new documents showing that officials lied about the air quality in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center.

The more than 170,000 pages of documents are being released by NYC in response to the transparency organization 9/11 Health Watch, which had sued to force their disclosure.

According to the New York Times, the documents reveal that higher-than-acceptable levels of asbestos and other contaminants were in the dust and air in other parts of Lower Manhattan after Sept. 11.

“An audit from November 2001, prepared by a private firm and submitted to the federal E.P.A. based on data collected by New York City and state agencies, showed other troubling findings,” the Times reported Monday.

“That audit demonstrated that air concentration of the carcinogen benzene was still spiking near the towers’ footprint, and that the concentration of asbestos in the air at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island had increased after the attacks.”

Despite having information about the poor air quality, government officials, including then-EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman, said the air around ground zero was safe to breathe.

Whitman has since apologized for her misrepresentations.

The Times warned that the disclosures could reopen NYC to new litigation at a time when New Yorkers who were in the city at the time are dying of lung and blood cancers, as well as heart and respiratory diseases.

Denise Verzi, whose husband, Michael, was a firefighter who suffered from lymphoma after responding to the attack, criticized the city for its lack of transparency.

“I don’t understand hiding it to begin with,” Verzi told the Times. “That was horrific. But 25 years in, there’s people that are still getting sick.”

Update(15:35ET): Oil climbed on reports of explosions on Iran’s Kharg Island:

Senior US officials to Fox: US military has struck targets near Kharg Island and Jask. The targets include Iranian oil tankers. This is part of a larger effort to squeeze Iran economically. The strategy includes sinking and disabling Iranian crude oil tankers. –FOX

MULTIPLE EXPLOSIONS HEARD NEAR KHARG ISLAND ANCHORAGE, A KEY IRANIAN OIL EXPORT HUB; CAUSE, ORIGIN & ANY POTENTIAL DAMAGE REMAIN UNCONFIRMED. – MEHR NEWS AGENCY

US is currently attacking Iranian oil tankers, i24 news reports, citing a US source

A small Iranian tanker was targeted by a missile attack from the US army 4 miles from Kharg Island, Tasnim reports
Via Tasnim

IRAN LAUNCHED UNDISCLOSED SECOND ATTACK ON US SHIPS ON MONDAY: WSJ

NO AMERICAN SHIPS WERE STRUCK IN THE ATTACKS: WSJ

Nothing official has yet to emerge, also amid unconfirmed reporting that Iran’s IRGC Navy has launched anti-ship cruise missiles from Jask toward the Strait of Hormuz. According to breaking Al Jazeera News:

Several explosions have been heard on Iran’s Kharg Island, according to Iran’s semi-official Mehr news agency. No official information has been released on the cause or origin of the explosions.

More from WSJ on the prior Monday attack incident: “No American ships were struck in the attacks, but Iran’s recent attempts to hit American naval assets are raising alarms that the regime is using more sophisticated weapons and could be getting assistance from China or Russia.”

But Trump claims the US is in ‘control’ of Hormuz and that the war is over. 

*  *  *

The heaviest fighting since the Iran war began is taking place in Yemen currently, also involving significant overnight attacks on Saudi energy and military sites by the Houthis.

The Houthis have since unveiled new operations, in a Tuesday statement saying the Iran-aligned group is targeting critical Saudi oil and military infrastructure. Widely circulating local videos suggest the attacks on multiple sites were in some case simultaneous and overwhelming.

“In response to this brutal aggression and in confronting comprehensive escalation with comprehensive escalation, the YAF carried out a large-scale … operation, targeting Aramco facilities in Abha and Najran, the Economic City, Aramco in Jizan, and Khamis Mushait Air Base, using dozens of ballistic missiles and drones,” said the Houthi statement.

“The strikes, by God’s grace, were accurate and direct and caused significant damage to those facilities,” it added. 

The kingdom’s Energy Ministry has indeed acknowledged fires and operations stoppages at several sites as a result, as well as damage and injured personnel.

“Several energy sector facilities and installations in the southern region of the kingdom were targeted this morning,” the energy ministry stated.

“The attacks caused fires at several locations, leading to a temporary halt in some operations. Specialized field teams have begun containing the fires, securing the sites, and assessing the damage,” the statement said. Aramco sites have been targeted on multiple occasions this summer, resulting in operations halts, particularly at key sites near the Yemeni border. Damage is still being assessed at the Aramco Jisan oil facilities, which were targeted yet again.

Also military and supply missions were hit, with the Houthi statement also indicating the destruction of Saudi military equipment and convoys of Saudi-backed forces of the internationally-recognized government.

For anyone putting a lot of faith in those pipelines that bypass Hormuz…

⚡️BREAKING: Houthis have released footage of Striking Saudi Arabia’s Supply Lines to Pro-Saudi Forces in Yemen with Ballistic Missiles pic.twitter.com/b3JQ78LQrK

— Iran Observer (@IranObserver0) September 7, 2026

“Arms trucks coming from Saudi Arabia were targeted and caught fire at the Al-Wadiah military camp,” the Houthis stated.

In response later on Tuesday, Saudi airstrikes have reportedly resumed on Yemen in the governorates of Al-Jawf, Al-Bayda, Ma’rib, Taiz, and Al-Hudaydah. Already the death toll is mounting from these renewed strikes:

Houthi rebels in Yemen accused Saudi Arabia of striking a prison on Monday in the country’s north, killing seven, including a child, as tensions escalate between the Iran-backed group and Saudi-backed Yemeni forces.

The strike on the Central Corrective Facility in the strategic city of Hazm in Jawf province also wounded at least seven people, including a woman, said Anees al-Asbahi, a spokesman for the Houthi-run health ministry.

The prison’s warden told the Houthi al-Masirah news channel 35 prisoners and a woman who was visiting her husband were trapped under the rubble.

The Saudi side has meanwhile said that dozens were injured in the Houthi attacks. Major General Turki Al-Maliki, spokesman for the Saudi-led Coalition Forces, blasted the new Houthi aggression as “dangerous” and “senseless” – and announced that at lest 73 people have been wounded, including women and children.

🚨BREAKING: Yemeni Drone Strike Impacts Near Saudi Arabia’s King Khalid Airbase

Stunned lookers in Khamis Mushait film the attack.

This is part of the largest ongoing missile & drone attack on Saudi Arabia from Yemen in years. A retaliatory campaign after strikes on Yemen. pic.twitter.com/SO1YVgl92K

— MintPress News (@MintPressNews) September 8, 2026

Both sides are now vowing escalation:

Houthi military spokesperson Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree accused Saudi Arabia of launching airstrikes and “committing massacres” in Jawf, as well as deploying a reconnaissance drone and supplying mercenaries with various weaponry.

“The ongoing Saudi aggression against Yemen will not go unanswered or unpunished,” he said.

The aerial war is additionally heating up: “Saree said later Monday that Houthi forces downed a total of four reconnaissance drones belonging to Saudi Arabia over the past 24 hours, including one that was spotted Monday morning in Bayda province,” as cited in The Associated Press.

Another test of the Mecca Agreement, which says an armed attack on any one of the three states will be regarded as an attack on all three. https://t.co/4V6lbh9LMN

— Jason Brodsky (@JasonMBrodsky) September 7, 2026

Oil prices on world markets continue to steadily inch higher, rising more than 1% as a result of Tuesday’s Saudi-Yemen escalation.

The Saudi coalition says it aims to liberate the country’s capital of Sanaa from the Iran-backed rebels. “The decision has been made to retake Sana’a. There are surprises we will not reveal now,” the Deputy Defense Minister Major General Samir Al-Sabri told state-run Yemen TV.

The Yemeni army further released a statement saying that “From today, we declare that our goal is clear and unequivocal: to liberate Yemen from the grip of the terrorist Houthi militias and restore Sana’a as a capital for all Yemenis.“

This appears a return to the kind of bull-blown war in Yemen which marked the latter half of the last decade. But this time it’s more complicated and dangerous in terms of regional spillover, given it comes in the context of the Iran conflict, the Strait of Hormuz crisis, and Houthi efforts to close Red Sea shipping to the Saudis, Israelis, and their allies.

Trump acknowledges 1) oil prices are high, 2) it’s because of the war with Iran, 3) the war has not ended, 4) the US has not won, yet. pic.twitter.com/gcsfqYmu0E

— Gregory Brew (@gbrew24) September 7, 2026

Below are more developments via Al Jazeera:

• Saudi Arabia has carried out new attacks in Yemen against al-Jubah district in Marib, in the Houthi-controlled part of the country, according to a news report in Houthi-run media.
• Forces loyal to Yemen’s internationally recognised government have launched a counteroffensive against the Houthi rebels, with officials saying they aim to recapture the capital Sanaa from the Iran-backed group.
• The Houthis say they repelled an offensive in al-Jawf, and at least seven people were killed in an air strike on a prison in the town of al-Hazm, pledging that the “aggression will not go unpunished”.
• Saudi Foreign Minister Prince ⁠Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud has described Yemen’s Houthi rebels as “selfish” for putting their own interests above the welfare of the country’s people. “The Houthis choose to prioritise their narrow interests over the interests of Yemen and resort to violence,” he said at a news conference in the Russian capital.
• Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has told his ⁠Saudi counterpart, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, in Moscow that Russia is ready to help resolve the spiralling situation in the Middle ⁠East.

Saudi-led forces in Yemen bombed Al-Jawf Central Prison:

#BREAKING

Saudi-led forces in Yemen bombed Al-Jawf Central Prison, causing death and injuries to at least 35 people. Terrible scenes#houthis #yemen #saudiarabia pic.twitter.com/sNBhWOZdaI

— METRONIDAZOLE (@METRO_NIDAZOLE) September 7, 2026

More Overnight News

via Newsquawk

• US President Trump posted, “Oil prices will drop precipitously, like everything else is dropping (but more!), when we WIN the war with Iran. Three Dollars a gallon, but ultimately, below Two Dollars a gallon. It will all happen quickly, and Iran will never have a Nuclear Weapon. MAGA!”
• Iranian President Pezeshkian said Iran has always opposed war but will continue to resist aggression with full force until the aggressors are made to regret their actions.
• Iran’s top national security official Rezaei said Washington has received a clear warning from Iran’s new missiles and that economic warfare will be met with a maritime exclusion zone across the Persian Gulf to the blockade perimeter, while he added that the operational posture toward US warships and bases has been fundamentally recalibrated.
• Tasnim analysis suggests that commentary from Iranian official Rezaei signals that Iran is considering expanding the geographic scope of its maritime confrontation into the northern Indian Ocean.
• Saudi Energy Minister said a number of energy facilities and utilities were hit and that some operations have been temporarily halted. This was later confirmed by the Houthis, in which they added that they struck the Khamis Mushait Air Base in retaliation to recent Saudi airstrikes. The group warned that further attacks on Yemen will be met with broader strikes on Saudi.