Ukraine’s Attack On Caspian Pipeline Consortium Aims To Destabilize Global Oil Markets: Kremlin
The Kremlin has accused Ukraine of orchestrating a plan to further destabilize global oil markets by carrying out drone attacks on the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC).
Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in Monday remarks, “We are in solidarity with the Kazakh Foreign Ministry in its decisive condemnation of this crime against a civilian facility.”
“We regard this attack as yet another confirmation of Bankova’s desire to further destabilize the situation on global oil markets,” the top diplomat emphasized, referencing the street houses the Office of the President of Ukraine.
“For it, ensuring global energy stability, as well as a respectful attitude toward foreign partners, in particular from Kazakhstan, with whom the Kiev regime allegedly wants to develop mutually beneficial and friendly relations, is an empty phrase,” she added.
The Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) terminal, which is off Russia’s Black Sea cost, confirmed Sunday that it was forced to suspend oil loadings, after a pair of oil tankers came under attack here.
Specifically the Asia and Nissos IOS tankers were attacked, with the former having caught on fire as a result, which was subsequently extinguished by emergency crews.
“There were no injuries or fatalities amongst CPC staff or contractors. There was no oil spill,” CPC later clarified while confirming that the tankers remained afloat.
“At present, crude oil loading operations at the terminal have been suspended pending a full assessment of the consequences of the incident,” CPC also said, but stopped short of identifying what entity was behind the attack.
Kazakhstan’s foreign ministry was outraged. “Upon completion of this assessment, Kazakhstan reserves all rights available under international law to protect its legitimate interests, including seeking full compensation for the damage caused,” it said.
This isn’t the first time that sections of the key energy route have been targeted by Ukrainian drones. For example a key section of Caspian Pipeline Consortium near Novorossiysk was temporarily been taken offline in a November 2025 attack.
It is surprising that the attacks on Caspian Pipeline Consortium are continuing, and another red line has been crossed, because for the first time in history of naval combat, tankers were attacked at loading point
The consortium’s over 930-mile pipeline connects oil fields in western Kazakhstan and Russian offshore fields in the Caspian Sea to a marine terminal in Novorossiysk, which means the location serves as the main export route for Kazakh oil, and is one of the world’s largest oil conduits by volume.
Three-quarters of households in Vienna connected to migrants from popular asylum-origin countries are unable to support themselves without government benefits, according to figures analyzed by Statistics Austria.
The analysis, cited by Kronen Zeitung, covered approximately 103,000 households across Austria containing at least one recognized refugee, asylum-seeker, or person granted subsidiary protection from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, or Chechnya in the Russian Federation.
Vienna recorded by far the highest rate of welfare dependence. About 75 percent of the households examined in the capital relied on minimum-income payments or comparable state support, meaning only one in four was considered economically self-sufficient.
Nationwide, 47 percent of the households included in the study could not support themselves independently, according to Exxpress.
For the purposes of the analysis, a household was considered self-sufficient when its income came from employment, pensions, unemployment insurance, or sickness benefits rather than minimum-income assistance and related welfare programs.
The findings stand in sharp contrast to the figures for Austrian households without an immigrant background. Depending on the state, between 90 percent and 93 percent of those households were classified as self-sufficient. Vienna again performed worse than the rest of the country, although its rate among non-immigrant households remained approximately 86 percent.
Integration Minister Claudia Bauer said the figures demonstrated the need to move welfare recipients into employment more rapidly.
“The welfare state should support people in becoming self-sufficient as quickly as possible,” Bauer told the Austrian newspaper. “It should never be attractive to live permanently on social benefits instead of providing for oneself and one’s family through work.”
The minister indicated that future policy would place greater emphasis on enforcing integration obligations. Recipients who refuse to participate in required integration measures could face reductions in taxpayer-funded benefits.
Officials have also pointed to Vienna’s removal of minimum-income support for people granted subsidiary protection. According to data from Austria’s Public Employment Service, unemployment among the affected group subsequently declined by more than one-third.
The government argues that the decline indicates many welfare recipients were capable of finding employment even under difficult economic conditions once benefit rules were tightened.
“Anyone coming to Austria must be able to provide for themselves and their families as quickly as possible,” Bauer said. “Work is the key to integration.”
While Vienna remains a hub for foreigners relying on taxpayer handouts, there are other areas across Austria where the percentages of foreign households raking in welfare benefits are disproportionate.
In January, separate figures showed that foreign nationals accounted for 72 percent of social-assistance recipients in St. Pölten, the capital of Lower Austria.
Of the city’s 1,278 benefit recipients, 528 (41 percent) were Syrian nationals. Another 99 recipients, representing approximately 8 percent, were Afghan nationals. Together, Syrians and Afghans accounted for nearly half of all recipients in a city with a population of approximately 56,000.
Austrian citizens accounted for 359 recipients, or 28 percent of the total, despite representing the large majority of the city’s population.
Perhaps the central battleground of contemporary politics is the need of our political elites to control the narrative. Primarily, the role of establishment politicians is not to deliver changes and reforms, not to fix problems identified by people in their everyday lives, and not to change circumstances such that they can attract votes, but to maintain narrative hegemony.
Crucially, this differs from previous attempts to maintain ideological hegemony – that is, to win the societal ‘battle of ideas’ – because ideological warfare was always related to the real world. For example, Stalinism’s ideological success was demonstrated in defeating the Nazi industrial machine at its own game, capitalism defeated communism by offering unparalleled standards of living, social democracy was ideologically effective to the degree it demonstrated you could balance both the demands of organised labour with those of economic growth.
By contrast, the attempt at narrative hegemony treats the political realm purely in the domain of information management. This is a political class that has given up on shaping the world and instead looks to shape the narrative.
A variety of attempts to maintain control of the narrative
The news cycle is full of examples that demonstrate that contemporary elites are concerned, above all, with controlling the narrative. Three suffice.
First, there was the recent confirmation of a story which many people had assumed for a long time, although was widely dismissed as a conspiracy theory. The British government has a special division, run out of Whitehall, called the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU). The job of RICU is to intervene with victims of potentially ‘racially inflammatory’ crimes and make sure that they ‘calm community tensions’. You could call this the ‘don’t look back in anger’ unit – its job is to make sure that government, victims and the media all stick to a story which encourages people to avoid asking difficult questions.
This unit has been involved in creating media narratives in conjunction with the press, public campaigns like plastering London in posters following the 2017 London Bridge attack, and working with victims’ families (such as the families of Henry Nowak) to write their statements to the press. In all such cases, the RICU unit serves to further the interests of state multiculturalism, force-feeding the public with the message that ‘division’ and ‘demonisation’ are the primary issues, rather than government policies on migration and multiculturalism.
Second, the Department for Media Culture and Sport released a proposal with an almost innocent-sounding name: Watch this space: a new strategic direction for UK media.
It proposes a ‘prominence regime’ for ‘trustworthy’ news on social media and video-sharing platforms. It would make news from public service media plus other ‘trustworthy’ providers ‘prominent and easy to find’. It gives the example of national and local news publishers appearing near the top of people’s social media feeds when they search for news, especially during ‘social unrest or crisis’.
The DCMS worries that online news is now heavily shaped by algorithms, that misinformation and echo chambers can worsen ‘polarisation, conflict and division’. The government will explore legislative options for a news-specific prominence regime on social media. The proposals explicitly raise whether this should be ‘ongoing and always on’ or only active in periods of crisis, and whether users should be allowed to switch it off.
A third example, which although I take from America is extremely relevant here, is the reaction to the brutal murder last year of Iryna Zarutska by Decarlos Brown Jr, a 14-time offender who was repeatedly set free by authorities under the influence of defund-the-police style racial-justice policing policies. Despite the case being an enormous sensation on social media, it took 18 days for the New York Times to comment. When it finally did, the article was a monstrosity of moral evasiveness. ‘A Gruesome Murder in North Carolina Ignites a Firestorm on the Right’, ran the headline, with the piece engaging in a bizarre detour to talk about the ‘egregiously exaggerated stories about Black criminality’ in the Jim Crow era.
The NYT was not alone in preferring to talk about the reaction to the attack rather than the attack itself. Elite barometer Politico went with ‘Ukrainian refugee killed in North Carolina gets dragged into political messaging war’, while Axios complained of ‘MAGA influencers seeking to elevate the issue of violent urban crime’. CNN, not to be outdone, produced this horrific example of the shiftiness of the passive voice: ‘How the lives of a Ukrainian refugee and a Charlotte man with a criminal history converged in a fatal stabbing.’
Clearly, the regime media was concerned above all with ensuring that no one draw any political consequences from the stabbing, which had been going viral on social media for almost a whole week. The issue for these outlets, when it became impossible to simply ignore the issue, was to ensure that widespread concerns about urban criminality, ineffective justice policies and the withdrawal of law and order prompted by the Black Lives Matter movement did not get a hearing. Such concerns are merely ‘right-wing firestorms’ and part of a regrettable ‘political messaging war’.
A very similar logic was seen in the days following the murder of the French student Quentin Deranque earlier this year by Antifa thugs. He had been attending a demonstration organised by a group of young women, and had come along lest they face any trouble. This man was simply murdered in cold blood by a premediated attack of Antifa militants, who picked him out, followed him home, and ambushed him 12-to-1 before kicking him in the head until he was dead. The mainstream French media reported that a far-right activist had died after inciting a confrontation.
In these examples, I don’t even have to mention the explicit censorship systems which now rule the Western world, such as the Online Safety Act or the EU’s Digital Services Act.
What drives attempts at narrative control
What is driving this? Why such a desperate need to exercise total narrative control?
The key to this issue, is, in essence, the following schematic: the established political class are unable to reckon with the sources of their unpopularity, and must employ ever more comprehensive attempts to provide a foundation for their deeply unpopular rule, because they face total destruction. The stakes are existential for them.
One of the fundamental driving facts of contemporary politics is that the ideology of the ruling class is thoroughly discredited. The political pressure on the ruling class is, across the West, extreme. They face, if not electoral annihilation, then electoral defeats to populist forces who, until recently, would have been totally marginal.
But the response of the political mainstream does not include the possibility of introspection. While they might be capable of asking the question why they are unpopular, they are incapable of answering it with a hard look at themselves.
At the same time, this ruling class certainly feels itself under sustained pressure. To invoke the language of Marxism, they feel threatened not just as a government, but as a class. Their class position – their position as the dominant political and economic group in society – is under threat.
These two facts – the inability to look in the mirror and the dread they feel at the approach of a new order – give rise to a response which at the same time focuses their efforts on political messaging and licenses extreme measures. Put together, this sets the stage for some of the most profound and most desperate attempts to control speech that we know in mature democracies.
Because they cannot avail themselves of introspection, they must come up with a particular explanation to understand their unpopularity. They need, to borrow a term from philosophy, an ‘error theory’ – that is, a theory for why it is that their programme, policies and worldview face such opposition. If they are on all issues fundamentally correct, why do people not agree with them? What explains the errors that the populist masses make?
The explanation is, in the time-honoured fashion of anti-democrats since Plato, that the voting masses are not just wrong, but also misled. The masses do not really disagree with the experts, they just lack the skills and knowledge to perceive what the experts have already decided is the truth. The masses have been tricked – tricked by sophists, by propagandists, by the internet, by Elon Musk, by Russians, by populist charlatans. They have been fed a diet of propaganda, hoodwinked by adversarial algorithms, fallen prey to foreign misinformation.
Therefore, the most important task for the ruling class, anxious to solve the problem of the erroneous masses, is to ‘fix’ the narrative imbalance. The problem of political disagreement becomes a problem of political messaging. If the truth has already been decided, but people still don’t see the light, then we need special techniques for bringing the masses to see the truth. Controlling the narrative – arranging what can be seen, heard and said – becomes not an alternative to democracy but the better substantiation of its essence.
At the same time, the class interest of the establishment is keenly felt by them all. This is not merely a possible change of government afoot but a change of regime. We are not talking about different shades of the postwar consensus, but a desire to overturn it entirely. Given how much the stakes have been raised, the available tools have become proportionally more powerful. Things that would have never been conceivable before in democratic peacetime – dawn raids over private messages, the use of the world’s most powerful technologies to change the debate in real time, gagging orders on the press so powerful their existence cannot even be mentioned – have become fair game in the contemporary political contest.
These two features come together to mean that the establishment classes are thus both psychologically and personally motivated to establish ever more elaborate and intrusive schemes for controlling the narrative.
Three strategies of control
We can group these tactics together under three banners
A. Strategies of control
B. Strategies of deception
C. Strategies of delegitimisation
The strategies of control are perhaps the most obvious – the various forms of soft and hard censorship, regulation of the internet and other communications.
The strategies of deception are also quite straightforward to spot. We have already mentioned the ‘don’t look back in anger’ unit, but we should also note the government supply of industrial-grade misinformation. One examples is the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) modelling the impact of migration by using info on migration from 20 years ago, ignoring, for example, care workers who bring 15 dependents. Another is the refusal to publish crime statistics broken down by nationality and migration status. NGOs are also part of these strategies of deception.
But so far we have said less about the strategies of delegitimisation. The most obvious example here is the hysterical moral panic around ‘foreign disinformation’ and the attempt to turn all critics of the establishment into various versions of stooges of Vladimir Putin (or, more recently, of Donald Trump).
It literally does not compute for the establishment to see mass discontent as the logical response to their despotic and failed policies, and so the possibility that this as all manipulated by Russia or funded by shady Trump-aligned forces is the only logical step.
Beyond controlling the narrative
This story – a story of a political class engaged in what is effectively an all-out war for survival – seems bleak enough. But it looks increasingly likely that as the narrative control efforts fail, they will intensify their work in more radical directions.
Indeed, the past few days gives us an indication into how Andy Burhnam – who is said to have a more ‘mature’ understanding of the problems of establishment politics – plans to deal with mass discontent. Burnham’s solution is to re-orient the Civil Service away from London. But the small print reveals this is less about devolution than a desire to make the Civil Service less responsive to any future Reform government: Politicoreveals he aims to ‘rewire’ the Civil Service to head off Farage.
This is just one part of a playbook now well-established in continental Europe. Macron has led the continent in ‘future-proofing’ the state against populist adversaries: key political allies of President Macron are being appointed to the top of major French institutions like the courts, the national bank and the armed forces.
But in addition, British bureaucrats will be considering adopting the whole continental package: mobilisation of paid Antifa to attack political opponents, the use of lawfare against opponents such as banning and financial investigations, and the solidifying of the deep state.
Reasons for optimism
Despite this dark picture, we actually have reasons to be far more optimistic about what the future holds. Ultimately, the reason for all of the efforts at narrative control is that the establishment have already lost the ideological battle, and their desperate attempts stem from the anticipation that they are about to lose the political battle as well.
The reason they lost is twofold. On the one hand, the impact of their policies have become unavoidable. On the other hand, a tremendous rebellion has taken place among ordinary people, fuelled by the tenacious work of an insurgent ideological counterweight.
Their fear is the justified fear of the losing party. They are terrified because of the enormous cumulative work of the great populist revolt. Just as the night is darkest before dawn or the cornered animal is capable of great violence, the established order is, I think, on its last legs. This means we should be both watchful but also cautiously optimistic.
Ultimately, the reason for elite panic is the mass of popular discontent. It is this desire for something profoundly different that is the condition for all our efforts to overturn the narrative hegemony that we would otherwise be subject to.
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Jacob Reynolds is convenor of the Academy, an intellectual retreat which is an initiative of the charity Ideas Matter, taking place on August 22nd & 23rd. Tickets and more here.
Oregon Sees Disturbing Spike In Gender Transition Therapy For Children
If you’re curious to see what the US would look like under an entrenched progressive regime, deep blue states like Oregon offer special insight. Four years of woke Democrats running the show under the Biden Administration was bad enough – Pride flags draped across the White House and naked transgenders dancing across the lawn was an embarrassing moment for the nation.
However, for people living on the West Coast, the agenda continues unabated.
The children of blue states are still on the menu, and Oregon is surpassing them all with an acceleration of gender-based indoctrination. According to a recent study published in Oxford Academic’s Research Connections, children in Oregon are up to three times more likely to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria compared to the national average.
The study maintains that the rate of gender treatments in Oregon remains “rare”, but when the numbers are compared to most states across the country a disturbing trend becomes visible. Using insurance data as a baseline, the authors note that between 2016 and 2023, roughly 1 in 240 girls and 1 in 630 boys in Oregon received cross-sex hormones by age 17. These rates are about 3x the national average for girls and 2x for boys (even higher – 4x to 5x – at ages 14 -15).
Oregon is the only U.S. state to formally adopt WPATH standards of care. This expands Medicaid coverage for hormones and surgeries, in many cases with no age minimums. The state also passed shield laws, which allow 15-year-olds to consent without parental notification.
The study’s authors argue this creates demand for gender based treatments rather than merely responding to a legitimate need for them. In other words, the trans trend in Oregon is artificially created through false diagnosis.
Add to this Oregon’s gender fluid indoctrination programs which have invaded all levels of the state’s public school system, and you get an ideological factory churning out brainwashed children who are then automatically diagnosed with gender dysphoria and “transitioned” before they have a chance to recognize what is happening to them.
The trans trend in Oregon is an extension of the woke takeover of American popular culture and politics starting in 2011-2012. From 2011 to 2022 in the US, there was a 100% increase in minors identifying as “trans” and a 285% increase in adults identifying as trans. In Europe the increase was even more expansive. In the UK, for example, the rate of trans identification jumped 50-fold.
This explosion in gender dysphoria coincided with an avalanche of gender fluid and LGBT propaganda which was not effectively exposed until recently. Today the wider public is aware of the trans agenda, but the fight to expose the targeting of children has been arduous.
Until a few years ago, Democrats outright denied that children were being given hormone blockers and gender-bending surgeries despite all the evidence to the contrary. The gas lighting was unprecedented. Blue states remain strongholds of woke cultism, and any children living in places like Oregon will still be preyed upon.
The latest studies confirm what many conservatives have suspected all along; that the sudden surge in trans identifying people is being driven by ideological pressure – An invasion of woke politics into the medical industry within blue states.
China is the one foreign power with both the resources and the strategic incentive to shape American technology.
Washington’s preoccupation with foreign influence has become almost reflexive, though curiously selective in its targets. Some lawmakers have built entire political identities around scrutinizing the influence of the Israel lobby on American foreign policy. Similarly, journalists trace Qatari money through American think tanks, and analysts fervently scrutinize Gulf investment in universities and sports franchises. Yet China, the one foreign power with both the resources and the strategic incentive to shape American technology and energy policy, occupies a curiously small share of this scrutiny. Given the evidence now available, that imbalance deserves correction.
Neville Roy Singham makes for an instructive starting point. Having sold his software consulting firm for hundreds of millions of dollars, Singham relocated to Shanghai, where he now works from an office shared with a Chinese media company whose stated mission is promoting Beijing’s narratives to foreign audiences. From that base, he has directed substantial funding toward a cluster of American nonprofits, including The People’s Forum, the ANSWER Coalition, and BreakThrough News, whose output consistently aligns with the positions of the Chinese government on major geopolitical questions. A visitor to his office once documented a banner reading “Always Follow the Party,” a detail that leaves little room for ambiguity about the network’s orientation.
What transforms this from an unusual biography into a matter of genuine political consequence is the organization that carries this network’s influence into American civic life. The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) openly calls for the replacement of the American government through revolutionary means rather than electoral politics, and its senior leadership is drawn almost entirely from the executives who run Singham’s nonprofits.
The party’s 2024 presidential nominee, Claudia de la Cruz, co-founded The People’s Forum. Her running mate directs one of Singham’s grantmaking bodies. Separately, the editor of BreakThrough News sits on the party’s central committee. This is not a loose ideological affinity between separate organizations. It is the same leadership operating under different institutional names.
That leadership has directed considerable energy toward one particular front, the American buildout of AI infrastructure. Across 21 documented campaigns in 14 states, the party has served as either the lead organizer or a significant participant in efforts that produced 10 local moratoriums, one permanent ban, and billions of dollars in delayed or canceled data-center investment. In Charlotte, party organizers ran a sustained door-to-door campaign ahead of a unanimous council vote to pause new data-center construction. In Prince George’s County, they trained residents to pressure local officials and helped build a petition that gathered 20,000 signatures before the county moved to halt permitting.
It would be a mistake to characterize the underlying opposition as manufactured. Concerns about water consumption and rising electricity costs are genuine and widely shared. But real grievances offer convenient cover, and an organization with documented financial ties to a Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-aligned network has positioned itself at the center of that anger while disclosing almost nothing about its own funding, since it maintains no registered nonprofit status and files no public financial statements for its general operations.
This pattern of quiet institutional penetration is not confined to street-level activism. It reaches into the universities that train the next generation of American policymakers. Tax filings obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show that Energy Foundation China, a nonprofit led by former Chinese government officials, sent $1.2 million to Harvard University and four campuses within the University of California system in 2024, nearly double what it had given the year before. The group’s chief executive previously served as a senior Chinese government climate negotiator, and the chairman of its board once worked as a director for China’s national legislature.
Its own staff roster reads like a directory of former Chinese state officials, including a one-time senior figure at the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau and a former manager of overseas infrastructure projects for a subsidiary of a state-run industrial conglomerate. One watchdog group described the organization bluntly as nothing more than an influence operation of the CCP.
The funding pattern is telling in its own right. Since 2020, the group has funneled more than $15 million into American universities and nonprofits while spending over $200 million domestically in China, a ratio that undercuts its public claim to be a nonpartisan charity focused solely on emissions reduction. Its money has also flowed to advocacy organizations that shape federal energy regulation directly, including a Washington research group that champions electric vehicle mandates and a Colorado think tank behind efforts to restrict gas stoves. Taken together, the strategy looks less like philanthropy and more like an attempt to steer American energy policy toward technologies that China already dominates, a shift that would deepen rather than reduce American dependence on Chinese manufacturing.
None of this activity occurs in isolation from the digital sphere. OpenAI’s own security researchers recently disclosed that they banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts operating from China, likely tied to a private firm serving provincial government clients, whose purpose was to generate social media content blaming data centers and artificial intelligence for rising household electricity bills. This material was not crudely fabricated. It was crafted to blend seamlessly with legitimate reporting on regional power pricing, complete with matching hashtags intended to blend inauthentic commentary into an authentic public conversation.
A related cluster pursued a parallel objective, producing cartoons critical of American tariff policy while explicitly instructing the model to depict only President Trump and to exclude any images of Xi Jinping, ensuring that blame for economic tension landed on a single, familiar target. This same network has been linked to accounts spreading false claims that ChatGPT user data had been compromised, an apparent attempt to erode public confidence in a leading American AI company, a tactic that closely resembles earlier Chinese campaigns against Western firms working to reduce dependence on Chinese rare earth supply chains. It is worth pausing on one particular irony here. These operators chose to use an American AI system to generate propaganda undermining trust in American AI, rather than relying on any of China’s own domestic models.
Three separate strands of evidence now point toward the same conclusion from three different directions.
One traces institutional funding, nonprofit leadership, and political organizing through American civic institutions.
Another traces academic grants flowing quietly into Harvard and the University of California from an organization run by former Chinese officials.
A third traces synthetic content, banned accounts, and coordinated amplification through American social media platforms.
All three converge on a single strategic objective: eroding public confidence in the infrastructure, institutions, and companies that underpin America’s position in energy and artificial intelligence.
None of this justifies treating every data-center protester, university researcher, or critic of AI policy as an unwitting instrument of foreign interference.
The vast majority of them are not.
But when a Shanghai-based financier’s nonprofit network, a revolutionary political party sharing its leadership, a Beijing-linked climate group funding elite American universities, and a state-linked propaganda operation all converge on adjacent fronts within the same narrow window of time, that convergence constitutes a pattern rather than a coincidence.
It is a pattern that has, so far, received far less attention than it warrants and one that deserves a far more prominent place in America’s ongoing conversation about who is trying to shape its politics from abroad.
National Guard Deployment To DC Will Continue Until Trump’s Term Ends
A new extension of the National Guard’s deployment to Washington will keep guardsmen in the nation’s capital until President Donald Trump’s term ends in more than two years.
The Pentagon confirmed on Thursday that the mission for which National Guard troops were deployed will continue until Jan. 20, 2029, or until the president terminates it.
The extension would allow National Guard members to remain in Washington until the next president is inaugurated, unless Trump ends the deployment early.
The deployment was previously scheduled to expire at the end of 2026.
As Timothy Fudd details below for The Epoch Times, Trump first deployed the National Guard to Washington in August 2025. He said the capital was “under siege from violent crime” and suggested that Washington’s local government had “lost control of public order and safety.”
“It is my duty to our citizens and Federal workers to secure the safety and the peaceful functioning of our Nation, the Federal Government, and our city,” Trump said in a presidential memorandum.
As of July 8, the task force said 5,148 guardsmen had been assigned to Washington. The War Department previously confirmed that about half of the National Guard members currently deployed in Washington had been sent to the capital to support operations during the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration.
Metropolitan Police Department crime statistics from Jan. 1 to July 17 showed that homicides have dropped by 38 percent compared with the same period last year. Additionally, robberies have decreased by 18 percent, motor vehicle thefts by 53 percent, and property crimes by 23 percent.
While total crime is down 20 percent from last year, the number of assaults with a dangerous weapon has increased by 45 percent. Total violent crime has also increased by 1 percent from last year.
During an address at Washington’s Meridian Hill Park on July 2, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth credited National Guard members serving in support of the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force for what he described as a “staggering” crime drop in Washington.
Speaking to more than 500 National Guard members, Hegseth said, “You’re not from Washington, most of you, but this is your capital, and you believe in this 250th year that it should be safe and it should be secure for every single citizen that lives here and every single citizen that comes to visit.”
Air Force Gen. Steven Nordhaus, chief of the National Guard Bureau, also credited National Guard members for saving more than 235 lives, providing more than 530 medical assists, and restoring children to their families 27 times.
While Hegseth said crime has “dropped in staggering amounts” with the task force’s support, some local government officials have criticized the deployment of National Guard members to Washington.
“Taxpayers are paying more than a million dollars a day to have them walk around,” City Council Chairman Phil Mendelson said in April.
He added that “the presence of armed soldiers on American streets is not a good look.”
The Congressional Budget Office previously released a report suggesting that the continued deployment of National Guard members in Washington could cost $55 million a month, based on an estimate of 2,950 guardsmen.
Following Trump’s order for National Guard members to support law enforcement operations in Washington, two National Guard members were shot in the city last fall. Army Specialist Sarah Beckstromdied from her injuries, while Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe was badly injured.
The suspected shooter was later identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national. Lakanwal was charged with 17 counts, including first-degree murder, in a superseding indictment in June. He has pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him.
This week, I was talking with one of my neighbors, a good man who raises hay and runs a cow-calf operation. As we discussed different approaches to grazing and pasture management, he laughed and called some of my ideas “fantastical fairy tales.” We both laughed.
We’ve known each other long enough that neither of us took offense. The truth is, some days even my husband thinks my ideas sound like fairy tales. Still, those conversations stay with me because I believe my greatest talent isn’t that I’m always right. Far from it.
My greatest talent is observing the world as honestly as I can and trying to make sense of it. Sometimes, those observations lead me to ideas that seem strange at first. Sometimes, they prove me wrong. Every now and then, they point toward something worth trying.
When I look across my neighbor’s ranch, I don’t see someone doing everything wrong. I see someone working incredibly hard within a system he knows well. I also see possibilities. I see a ranch that could support more cattle through planned, holistic grazing. I see more diverse forage creating healthier soils, reducing fertilizer needs, and making the pasture more resilient during both drought and heavy rain. I see a business that could become more profitable by relying less on purchased inputs and letting the land do more of the work.
Would every one of those ideas succeed? I honestly don’t know. Nature has a way of humbling anyone who thinks they’ve figured everything out. But if we’re unwilling to ask the question, we’ll never discover the answer.
That conversation reminded me of the political debate surrounding agriculture today. Increasingly, we’re told we have to choose between two competing goals. Either we support farmers making a living, or we support healthy, nutrient-dense food. One side talks almost exclusively about production and profitability. The other talks almost exclusively about health and sustainability. As if those two goals are somehow incompatible.
I reject that premise entirely.
I know regenerative farmers who produce incredible food but struggle to pay the bills. Some days I count myself among them. I also know conventional farmers who have built profitable businesses that have supported their families for generations.
At the same time, I know regenerative farmers whose operations are thriving because they’ve reduced input costs, improved their land’s productivity, and built businesses around healthier soil.
I also know conventional farmers who are struggling under debt, rising fertilizer prices, volatile markets, and shrinking margins. The labels don’t explain success or failure nearly as well as people want them to.
Maybe we’re asking the wrong question. Instead of arguing over which system is better, why aren’t we asking what the best farmers are doing? What can profitable farmers teach those who are struggling? What can farmers producing healthier, more nutrient-dense food teach everyone else? Why do politics and the media insist these ideas belong on opposite teams when they could be working together?
I’ve watched this play out on my own ranch. For years, my uncle cared for our pigs, but recently, he admitted that age had caught up with him and the physical demands were becoming too much. My husband stepped in, and before changing anything, we visited other hog farmers, asked questions, and looked at different management systems. Some of the ideas seemed unnecessary. Others challenged habits that had been in place for years. We decided to try them anyway.
We built larger paddocks, gave the pigs more pasture, and changed the way we managed their feed. The pigs are gaining the same weight on the same land while using roughly half as much feed. We didn’t discover a miracle ration. We changed the management. Sometimes there’s a real cost to being stuck in our ways.
I’ve seen the same lesson with our cattle. We’ve always rotated our cows, but I struggled to convince my husband that moving them multiple times throughout the day would make enough difference to justify the effort.
Then, a young man who had come to live with us as a teenager challenged both of us. He has become one of the most committed, hardest-working regenerative farmers I know. He reads grazing magazines, studies successful ranchers from around the country, and is constantly looking for better ways to steward the land.
He believed our cattle would benefit from more frequent moves, and my husband was willing to experiment. Instead of creating dozens of tiny paddocks, he found a practical compromise. He still builds a larger paddock, then simply moves one strand of wire forward 20 or 25 feet at a time throughout the day. The cattle naturally follow the fresh forage, the pasture receives more recovery time, and the improvement has been obvious enough that neither of us questions whether the extra effort is worthwhile.
My husband didn’t change his mind because I won an argument. He changed his mind because the land made the argument for me.
That’s how agriculture has always advanced. Farmers observe. They experiment. They borrow good ideas from neighbors. They keep what works and abandon what doesn’t. The best farmers I’ve met aren’t loyal to a label. They’re loyal to learning.
Unfortunately, our political system often rewards the opposite. Agriculture, like healthcare, energy, and many other industries, has become deeply intertwined with government and powerful financial interests. Companies that sell seed, fertilizer, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, machinery, and feed all have every right to advocate for their businesses.
But when those industries become deeply connected to the policymakers who write the rules, the conversation tends to narrow. The question stops being, “What produces the healthiest soil, the healthiest people, and the most resilient farms?” and becomes, “How do we protect the system we’ve already built?”
That partnership between government and large industry wasn’t something ordinary Americans voted for, yet it increasingly shapes the choices placed before farmers and consumers alike.
None of this means every conventional practice is wrong or every regenerative practice is right. It means we should be deeply suspicious whenever politics tells us we must choose between two goals that can clearly coexist.
Healthy food and profitable farms are not opposing ideas. Across this country, there are farmers proving every day that both are possible. Instead of asking which side should win, perhaps we should spend more time learning from the people who are already getting both right.
Maybe my neighbor will always think some of my ideas sound like fairy tales. That’s okay. If I’ve learned anything from farming, it’s that today’s fairy tale has a funny way of becoming tomorrow’s common practice. The greatest resource on any farm isn’t the land, the livestock, or the equipment. It’s a farmer who’s still willing to ask, “What if there’s a better way?”
Woman Walks Into Ontario Police Department With Live World War II Grenade
An Ontario police department is warning residents not to bring unexploded military munitions to the station after a woman walked in carrying a live World War II grenade, according to the NY Post.
The incident happened at an Ottawa-area Ontario Provincial Police detachment, where officers said a resident arrived with the decades-old explosive after finding it while cleaning out her basement.
The Post writes that the 77-year-old woman was immediately told to leave the grenade outside the building as a precaution.
Police later said the device was secured until the Canadian Forces’ explosives team could safely remove and dispose of it.
Officials used the incident to remind the public that unexploded ordnance can remain dangerous even after sitting untouched for decades.
“You don’t know what condition they’re in, whether they can still explode,” Ontario Provincial Police spokesperson Michael Fathi told the Ottawa Citizen. “You don’t want to take a chance.”
The department stressed that anyone who discovers old grenades, bombs, shells or other military explosives should never transport them.
Instead, residents are urged to leave the item exactly where it is, keep a safe distance and call local police, who will arrange for an explosives disposal unit to handle it safely.
“This could obviously prove extremely dangerous to the person bringing the item and others around,” the department warned.
A convoy of sheriff’s deputies heads into a vast network of illegal marijuana grow operations in the foothills of Mount Shasta in California’s Siskiyou County.
They drive into a dusty encampment strewn with garbage and piles of empty plastic fertilizer containers, a blight on the otherwise scenic landscape.
The morning raid is nothing new for Siskiyou County Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue.
Thousands of makeshift greenhouses known as “hoop houses” – each one containing hundreds of illegally grown cannabis plants – are operating in the county at any given time, LaRue told The Epoch Times, as his deputies scoured the Mount Shasta Vista subdivision, a 20-minute drive northeast of Weed, Calif.
The sheriff’s office has counted 2,732 hoop houses using satellite and aerial imagery in the subdivision alone.
By the time he arrived at the scene on June 4, all the occupants had fled.
Spotters at these illegal grow sites – sometimes armed with AK-47s and rifles, according to nearby residents – alert laborers to leave the camp when they see sheriff’s deputies approaching.
Except for a few roosters, an older German shepherd, and a couple of curious pups, the site was abandoned. The occupants had already cleared out when an advance team of investigators approached the camp earlier that morning.
They know the drill.
About 430 flowering marijuana plants were found in each of two 30-by-100 foot hoop houses. Agents from the regional North State Marijuana Investigation Team weighed about 900 pounds of freshly cut marijuana plants that were hanging to dry in another slightly larger greenhouse.
All the marijuana was destroyed. No one was arrested, according to the sheriff’s office.
The team had served a search warrant on the same property last August and arrested the property owner, Haizhou Wang, then 56, who was on-site at the time.
Cannabis industry experts estimate that more than 30 million pounds of illicit marijuana are grown in the United States annually.
Siskiyou County alone produces about 17.8 million pounds of illegal marijuana every year, with a “low-end” estimated local street value of about $3.6 billion based on sales at $200 a pound, according to the sheriff’s office.
A typical pound of processed black-market marijuana may sell for a couple hundred dollars in California, but can sell for $1,500 in Midwest and East Coast markets and much more in other countries, according to both the sheriff’s office and the California Department of Cannabis Control.
The Chinese Connection
Even as the potency of marijuana has increased exponentially, black-market prices have remained stable, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
Over the past two decades, Chinese and other Asian crime syndicates have taken control of the black-market marijuana trade.
“These organized crime groups, as well as Mexican cartels, are profiting from both illegal cultivation and sales, and from exploiting the ‘legal’ market,” the agency states in its 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment.
Under federal law, the cultivation and sale of any marijuana remains illegal, but in states that have legalized or decriminalized cannabis, organized crime has only proliferated – not shrunk as cannabis proponents promised.
Chinese transcontinental criminal organizations now dominate the cultivation and distribution of marijuana throughout the United States from California to Maine, with real estate purchases for both indoor and outdoor grows funded via family and community connections in China and the United States, according to the DEA.
“Undocumented Chinese immigrants, many of whom spent years in Mexico and were lured to the United States with offers of legal employment, staff many of the grow sites alongside undocumented Mexican immigrants in similar circumstances. The undocumented migrants are closely monitored by the Chinese [transcontinental criminal organization] members who own and manage the grows,” according to the assessment.
“Most of the grow sites are located in states where the cannabis industry is ‘legal,’ though most do not follow the established licensure process or have obtained their licenses through falsified means. They face little prison time, if any, when caught, and often move to a new location in the same state or to another ‘legal’ state once discovered.”
An extensive money laundering network involving “registered marijuana grows using straw owners, casinos, and mortgage fraud,” fueled by the Chinese underground banking system with a main hub in New York City, is used to send illicit cannabis proceeds to mainland China, according to the assessment.
In 2024, Oklahoma accounted for 66 percent of the illicit marijuana seized nationwide while California accounted for 15 percent, followed by Maine, Missouri, and Indiana with 3 percent each.
Within the United States, large shipments of marijuana are usually hauled in semi-trailers, while smaller amounts are transported in personal vehicles using a “shotgun approach” to minimize risk.
“The ‘shotgun approach’ involves sending multiple vehicles, usually carrying no more than a couple hundred pounds of marijuana each, to the same destination to avoid the loss of a single, large shipment,” according to the assessment.
Illegal Chinese-Labeled Pesticides
LaRue inspects a bag of Chinese-labeled pesticide containing three individually wrapped packets of the material found in one of the hoop houses.
“This is a new package that I’m not familiar with,” he said.
Highly toxic banned foreign-labeled pesticides – mostly smuggled into the United States from China – are used to grow black-market cannabis at about 80 percent of these sites, LaRue told The Epoch Times.
The pesticides are so toxic they pose an extreme risk not only to people who use it, but those who cultivate the cannabis and law enforcement officers who are exposed to it, LaRue said.
“We eradicate in place,” he said. “We destroy it at the scene here because it’s so toxic that we don’t want to risk touching it ourselves.”
The camps are littered with beer and soda cans with the tops cut off to hold packets of toxic sawdust-like material, which is burned in the hoop houses.
“They light it on fire. Sometimes, they use little wicks like a fuse, and then that’ll fumigate inside the grow house,” the sheriff said. “It’s designed to kill all the bugs on the plants.”
But the toxins stay with the plants after they’re harvested and the contaminated cannabis makes its way to both the legal and black markets and to users who smoke or ingest it, he said.
Enough analysis has been done to determine that contaminated cannabis is “slipping through” to licensed dispensaries. Illegally grown cannabis from Siskiyou County containing these dangerous “highly toxic pesticides” has been tracked to licensed facilities in California and Oregon, he said.
Although legally grown cannabis is certified as safe, LaRue says the state isn’t testing for all pesticides.
Some of the banned pesticides can be fatal if inhaled and can cause severe skin irritation, respiratory problems, and, if ingested, neurological conditions, he said.
Investigators have found 27 pesticides at illegal grow sites – 17 of them that are not subject to required testing by the California Department of Cannabis Control, according to the sheriff’s office. Of these pesticides, 12 are listed as acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, which affect the nervous system, and – according to the National Institute of Health – can cause seizures, coma and respiratory failure.
Under the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, a state law otherwise known as Proposition 65, eight of these pesticides are listed as carcinogens, seven are banned in the United States, six are listed as groundwater pollutants, and those used as fumigants are listed as toxic air contaminants, according to the sheriff’s office.
The pesticide found in the June 4 raid was later found to be an isoprocarb-based fumigant, which is an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor not approved for use in the United States, the sheriff’s office said.
The Backstory
Inside some of the hoop houses, the plants are trained with micro-thin string that looks like fishing line attached to each branch. The technique is a traditional growing method used by Hmong American growers in outdoor and greenhouse cultivation operations in California, Oregon, and Washington state.
Between 2016 and 2019, when California began to relax its marijuana laws, about 2,000 people, mostly Hmong, moved to Siskiyou County to illegally cultivate and sell black-market cannabis, LaRue said.
They purchased cheap land – with volcanic soil unsuitable for most agricultural uses – zoned for residential use, he said.
The lots range anywhere from a single acre to 100 acres, with even the smallest parcels containing at least two hoop houses and outdoor grows. Each lot produces an average of 2,017 plants, and crops can be harvested three to four times a year, with each new plant yielding between one and five pounds of flower per grow cycle, according to the sheriff’s office.
Community leaders representing the growers estimate 5,000 to 8,000 people now work at these illegal grow sites in the county, the sheriff’s office said.
The Hmong people are an ethnic group with strong cultural ties to China, where they trace their ancient roots. Many Hmong immigrated to the United States from the mountainous regions of China, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand.
The CIA recruited thousands of Hmong men in Laos to fight against communist forces during the Laotian civil war, known as the Secret War. But in 1975, after the communist takeover of Laos and the fall of Saigon ended the Secret War and the Vietnam War, the Hmong faced persecution and were forced into refugee camps in Thailand before fleeing to the United States, France, Germany, Canada, and Australia.
Narco-Slavery
The proliferation of black-market grow sites has led to narco-slavery, which is difficult to police, prove, or prosecute. LaRue suspects the laborers, some of whom are illegal immigrants, are sending money back to China or working off debts owed to the Mexican cartels who got them into the country.
State law, including Senate Bill 54, restricts sheriffs and state law enforcement officers from asking anyone about their immigration status, which can be problematic in determining if the laborers at the camps are illegal immigrants, he said.
The workers at the camps face filthy and deplorable living conditions with little food and money. They don’t own vehicles and are often moved from grow site to grow site. In many cases, they are victims as much as they are criminals, he said.
They’ve been duped and promised more than what they’ll ever be paid, but most of them won’t talk to police for fear of reprisal, LaRue said.
He recalls a letter he received from someone who escaped from one of the camps.
“They fled in the middle of the night,” he said. “They were threatened that if they tried to leave, they would be killed.”
The sheriff and his deputies inspect the living quarters of laborers at encampments for evidence to assess who may have been coerced to stay, and when they find laborers who are victims of forced labor, they “get them out of the situation and care for them,” he said.
“Not everybody wants to be out here in these cultivation sites, and so that’s our job as investigators, to ensure they’re not being trafficked to work off debt,” LaRue said. “Most of them don’t want to tell us the full story about why they’re there. They’re afraid.”
Sparse clothing and a few personal belongings found in plywood shacks are often everything the workers own – a sign they “probably were brought here” and live at the camps without homes to go to, he said.
Inside a trailer at the camp, the sheriff finds an outdoor propane tank used as a heater, posing a risk of fire and carbon monoxide poisoning, and a business card for a company that trucks water.
A communal shack well-stocked with bottled water suggests the residents aren’t using hauled water for cooking or drinking because it is likely contaminated.
Lawsuits Settled
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a class-action lawsuit against Siskiyou County and LaRue over an ordinance intended to restrict water deliveries to the illegal cannabis grow sites in the Mount Shasta Vista subdivision, and also sued the sheriff for alleged racial profiling, accusing him of targeting the Asian – mostly Hmong – community.
The ACLU Foundation of Northern California, Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus, and Covington and Burling LLP sued on behalf of four Asian Americans in August 2022, claiming county officials “waged a systematic campaign of racist hostility and persecution, including restricting Asian Americans’ right to water and executing unlawful traffic stops, search and seizure practices.”
On June 30, the Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors agreed to a $650,000 settlement to resolve remaining claims in the Mathis et al. v. County of Siskiyou et al. case, following a $350,000 partial settlement last December.
Who Are The Illegal Growers?
Most of the large illegal outdoor grows are associated with Mexican drug cartels and Asian – primarily Chinese – crime syndicates, according extensive congressional testimony from witnesses.
In the Mount Shasta Vista area, the illegal growers are a mixture of about 60 percent Chinese and 40 percent Hmong, LaRue said.
Most of the large-scale grow operations – 80 to 100 acres – are run by Chinese operators, who are “mass producing” illegal cannabis,” he said.
The hierarchy behind the illegal grows is “a very mysterious network of individuals” likely tied to mainland China, but it’s hard to know for certain, he said.
“Money, for sure, has been linked from our county back to China,” LaRue said.
Most of the property deeds list multiple names as landowners.
“They sort of load these parcels with a bunch of names that may or may not be real, and they have different corresponding addresses that are at different locations around the nation, and it makes it hard to really pinpoint,” he said.
“So there’s always this distancing going on, and when we serve a search warrant, it’s rare that the individuals we contact on the property are also on the deed.”
When laborers are confronted by the sheriff’s deputies, they claim to be working for somebody else or that they’re squatting, LaRue said.
“It started off as people cultivating, and they would claim that they were relatives of the owner,” he said. But when the owners were contacted, they would say they had no idea who was on the property.
“What’s happening on paper is not representative of what’s happening in the field as far as who’s associated with the properties.
“It’s a massive shell game. It’s intentional.”
The Hmong appear to be working together with the Chinese growers and are now using the same banned pesticides, he said.
“When the Chinese pesticides started appearing in Siskiyou County, we started seeing it at Chinese cultivation sites, but then we started seeing it at some of the Hmong cultivation sites, and we learned that the Hmong individuals were buying the Chinese-labeled pesticide from the Chinese,” LaRue said
“So I think they’re just working together, either literally or just sort of tolerating two different types of business models. There’s not a lot of turf wars going on out there.”
Environmental Hypocrisy?
Though California is known for its tough environmental regulations and ensuring that businesses post warnings about chemicals that could be carcinogenic or cause health issues, it’s a different story when it comes to illegal marijuana grow sites, LaRue said.
The state claims to be protecting the environment, yet it’s failing to take action against illegal cannabis growers who are “blatantly contributing” to environmental harm and public health issues, he said.
“It is swept under the rug, and that’s hypocrisy,” he said. “Even when the state is called out on it, they fail to appropriately respond. They’re refusing to address it.”
The black market is plainly visible and allowed to operate in the open, but the state leadership, he said, doesn’t want to recognize the enormity of this problem or admit “they messed up” because it was “their creation.”
“It’s bad press,” LaRue said.
In any market but the cannabis world, he said, illegal grow operations would be considered a public health threat and “environmental catastrophe,” and owners would face heavy fines and criminal charges.
“All of the state agencies are just tiptoeing around this,” he said. “That’s what’s so crazy: They’ll go after anybody else, but when it has to do with marijuana, they just turn a blind eye to it. It is a double standard.”
Legitimate ranchers and farmers in the Shasta and Scott river watersheds have faced serious water use restrictions, but the state refused to crack down on any illegal use by people who are either siphoning water illegally out of the rivers or essentially stealing groundwater.
“If they were using it for illegal marijuana, they weren’t getting fined, they weren’t getting letters to stop using. But they shut down the legitimate agriculture,” LaRue said.
“When you have people trying to make a living and they’re being told that they can’t use water, but then you have an entire black market criminal enterprise that’s not being held accountable, it’s hypocrisy, and it’s frustrating.”
With limited staff to cover more than 6,300 square miles, the sheriff’s department is spread thin, especially considering the massive “marijuana footprint” spread across different areas of the county.
Violent crime associated with illegal marijuana grow ops has increased significantly in these populations, including five homicides in as many years, assaults, sexual assaults, kidnapping, and domestic violence, the sheriff said.
State Rejects Sheriff’s Claims
While state agencies claim every effort is being made to stamp out the black market, LaRue disagrees. He says the volume of illegal marijuana eradicated is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount that’s grown and sold on the black market.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Office stated in a July 8 press release that since the Unified Cannabis Enforcement Task Force was established in 2022, it has seized and destroyed more than 841,000 pounds of illicit cannabis, eradicated more than 89,000 cannabis plants, and disrupted organized criminal operations in 10 counties.
In an April press release, Newsom’s office said the state has eradicated more than a million illegal plants, “cleared over 215,000 cannabis convictions,” and “thwarted $1.2 billion in illicit cannabis activity” since cannabis was legalized under Proposition 64, a statewide referendum, in 2016.
In July 2023, the task force served 24 search warrants in Siskiyou County and seized $68.5 million in illicit cannabis, a dozen firearms, and illegal pesticides. About $30,000 in fines were also levied after the raid.
While LaRue applauded the task force’s efforts three years ago, the task force never returned to Siskiyou County to assist in marijuana eradication efforts or conduct another major raid, he said.
Had the task force returned, the sheriff’s office and Cannabis Control could have significantly reduced the black market’s product and profit that summer, LaRue said.
LaRue has repeatedly asked the governor and state agencies to conduct more state-led operations – including raids and arrests – separate from those initiated by the sheriff’s office, rather than simply eradicating illegal cannabis.
The governor’s office did not directly respond to an inquiry, instead deferring it to the California Department of Cannabis Control and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Alicia de la Garza, deputy director of public affairs at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, wrote in an email to The Epoch Times that since Newsom launched the task force in 2022, more than 700 search warrants across 36 counties in California have led to 76 arrests and the seizure of more than $2.5 million in cash and about 230 firearms, according to the latest data.
The department’s officers “led the service” of four warrants and assisted in task-force coordinated operations in Siskiyou County in 2025, when more than 100 other warrants were served. About 842 illicit cannabis plants and 7 1/2 pounds of processed cannabis were seized in those raids, she said in the email.
The agency also served 12 additional warrants in Siskiyou County in 2025 that resulted in the seizure of 8,750 illicit cannabis plants, about 1,368 pounds of processed cannabis, and one firearm, and two arrests.
Fish and Wildlife officers supported operations led by other entities in Siskiyou County in 2025 that involved the service of 97 warrants and the seizure of 125,180 illicit cannabis plants, 13,944 pounds of processed cannabis, and 16 firearms. These operations resulted in 35 arrests.
But the sheriff’s office disputes those claims, accusing the state of misrepresenting data and taking credit for much of its work.
Jordan Traverso, deputy director of public affairs for the California Department of Cannabis Control, acknowledged that illegal cultivation in Siskiyou County is “a serious public safety, environmental, and community-impact issue” and “remains an enforcement priority,” in an emailed response to an Epoch Times inquiry.
Traverso denied that the state is allowing illegal cannabis growers to unlawfully use water resources while water allotments to ranchers and farmers are restricted.
“If an illegal cannabis operation is stealing water, diverting water without authorization, damaging waterways, or violating water-use restrictions, that conduct is illegal. It is not authorized, excused, or accepted because the crop is cannabis,” she wrote.
“Illegal cannabis operators are not being given permission to take water. They are breaking the law.”
Traverso also dismissed criticisms that the state has ignored the use of banned pesticides, illegal fumigants, water theft, environmental contamination, and other hazardous conditions at illegal grow sites.
“Illegal growers are not being given a pass, and [the Department of Cannabis Control] does not accept the claim that the state is turning a blind eye to environmental violations tied to illegal cannabis cultivation,” she wrote in the email.
Approximately 150 officers are responsible for enforcing cannabis laws statewide – about 75 assigned to each of the Cannabis Control and Fish and Wildlife departments.
NYC Street Vendors Now Openly Selling Illegal Prescription Pills Across 10 Blocks
What looks like an ordinary row of street vendors in Washington Heights is, in reality, an illegal outdoor pharmacy, according to the NY Post.
Along roughly half a mile of St. Nicholas Avenue, between West 179th and West 183rd streets, vendors openly sell prescription medications from folding tables, offering everything from antibiotics and pain medications to erectile dysfunction pills and over-the-counter remedies.
The Post writes that the operation stretches across about 10 blocks, with dozens of nearly identical setups displaying loose blister packs, bottles, and boxed medications. Many of the products are sourced from the Dominican Republic, where some prescription drugs can be purchased far more easily than in the United States, before being brought into New York and resold.
Vendors were willing to explain what each medication was for and how customers should take it. Antibiotics such as amoxicillin and ampicillin were among the most commonly offered drugs, alongside anti-inflammatory medications, Viagra, Cialis, vitamins, and cold remedies.
According to several sellers, business begins each morning around 9 a.m. They wheel in carts loaded with merchandise, set up umbrellas and tables, and remain on the sidewalks until early evening. Some estimated they can clear $300 or more on busy days, with profits coming from marking up inexpensive medications purchased overseas.
One vendor admitted that customs officials occasionally intercept shipments arriving from the Dominican Republic, but said enough products still make it through to keep the trade alive.
Medical professionals say the operation poses obvious risks. Prescription drugs are being sold without prescriptions, without any verification of authenticity, and often after sitting outside for hours in the summer heat. A neighborhood pharmacist warned that temperature-sensitive medications, including diabetes drugs, have been spotted on the tables, potentially rendering them unsafe or ineffective.
Residents expressed frustration that the market operates so openly. During multiple visits, vendors continued selling medications in plain sight despite a visible police presence nearby. Some neighbors said they were stunned that prescription drugs could be sold so openly while enforcement appeared minimal.
The practice carries serious legal consequences. New York law makes the unlicensed sale of prescription medications a felony, while illegally importing pharmaceuticals from another country can also trigger federal criminal penalties, including substantial fines and prison time.
Several elected officials criticized the sidewalk drug market, arguing it has become both a public health hazard and another example of lax enforcement. They warned that buyers have no reliable way of knowing whether the pills are genuine, properly stored, or even contain the ingredients listed on their packaging.
City officials did not respond to requests for comment.
