Authored by Eva Fu & Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

One flash is all it takes.

That’s how James Tour said the United States can tackle China’s rare earth dominance.

All he needs is discarded electronics—of which the United States has mountains. And from these scraps, the Rice University chemist and nanotechnologist has pioneered a way to quickly extract rare earth metals.

“We can pull out one metal and then the next,” he told The Epoch Times. “It’s really that simple.”

Tour’s solution is flash Joule heating: rapidly heating up the materials to thousands of degrees to vaporize the metals. Mixed with chlorine gas, the vapors turn into chlorides that emerge at different temperatures.

Just like in an incandescent light bulb, the technique works by passing an electric current through the raw material, Tour said. But whereas the former channels a steady electric current to create a perpetual glow, in treating metals, the energy arrives in short bursts, dialing up heat in milliseconds.

“Metals are infinitely recyclable,” he said.

And whereas the traditional way of distilling metals is rather “messy,” Tour said, what he proposes is all about simplicity—“you flash and you’re done.”

Speed is now more critical than ever. The United States is racing against time to reshore rare earth production, spurred in part by China’s October threat to dramatically curtail access.

With a one-year truce in hand, Washington now has a short window to close the gap. Getting a mine up and running can take 15 years.

Tour said his technology would put the United States on a faster track.

“It would give us a map to get independent,” he said.

“You can get these things going for a few tens of millions of dollars. That’s not very much when it comes to this type of manufacturing.”

US Dominance Lost to China

Rare earths, a subgroup of 17 critical minerals, are essential components in electric vehicles, wind turbines, smartphones, and missiles.

China currently sits at the center of this vital global production chain. It makes more than 90 percent of the world’s rare earth magnets, according to International Energy Agency data. China is also the sole supplier for certain elements, such as samarium, used in fighter jets and nuclear reactors for its high heat resistance.

This dominance comes from decades of strategic investment, lavish state subsidies, and aggressive market manipulation that stifled foreign competition.

Decisions made in the United States also played a part.

Until 1991, the country was a leading producer of rare earth minerals; the Mountain Pass mine in California supplied most of the world. Environmental troubles then shuttered the mine for years at the same time China began to gain a foothold.

Against the Pentagon’s objections, the U.S. government greenlit the 1995 sale of Magnequench, then the industry leader in rare earth magnets, to a Chinese front group, effectively handing over critical defense technology and manufacturing to China.

In 2004, Magnequench closed its Indiana plant and moved operations to China. Beijing started taxing exports of rare earth minerals the following year.

Twenty years later, the United States is beholden to Chinese minerals.

“We didn’t realize that we were selling something that turned out to be very important to our country,” Tour said.

Waste to Treasure

As early as 1976, the United States had a law regulating electronic waste disposal.

In the years that followed, the ballooning electronic waste created a whole recycling industry that still struggles to catch up. It’s now the fastest-growing type of waste, rising five times faster than recycling, according to the United Nations.

The United States produced 7.2 million tons of electronic waste in 2022—about one-eighth of the world’s total, the latest U.N. data show. That’s about 46 pounds for every American.

“We have these mountains of tailings that we can access, and we have these constant mountains of printed circuit boards,” Tour said.

Tour said that their method could clean up this spiraling nightmare of waste sites and turn it into a “treasure.”

Lucas Eddy, technology development manager for Metallium’s Texas subsidiary Flash Metals USA, said he is now seeing the idea being put into practice.

“The real reason a waste product is a waste product isn’t because it’s bad, it’s because it can’t be used,” he told The Epoch Times.

Here’s where flash Joule heating shines, according to Eddy, whose Texas factory has licensed the method for metal recovery.

Old Tech Reimagined

Joule heating—passing an electric current through a conductor to produce heat—has been around since the 1840s. It’s now an integral feature of every household, in toasters, electric heaters, ovens, and hair dryers.

Until now, no one had thought to use it for electronic waste.

The spark for Tour’s team began with reading a scientific paper describing using the flash Joule heating technique to make metallic nanoparticles.

The researchers tested the technique on carbon and found that it was a quick way to make high-quality graphene at low cost. They next began exploring its potential in extracting the much-needed rare earth metals.

Eddy, a 2025 Tour lab graduate, joined the project in early 2021 just as this shift began.

“It’s really live chemistry in action,” he said. “You see a rainbow of colors coming off.”

Each change of color represents one metal element that has separated out. Rare earths, usually with some of the highest boiling points, tend to come out last—often as a white powder, he said.

The project drew interest from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which asked them to make it more industrially applicable, Tour said. Under a federal contract, the team worked on lowering boiling points, experimenting with fluorides and chlorine in various forms, and eventually settled on chlorine gas.

That step was “revolutionary,” Eddy said.

Read the rest here…

Israeli President Isaac Herzog acknowledged this week that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s request for a pardon in his corruption trial is generating significant debate and division within Israeli society. Herzog said that Netanyahu’s formal petition for the charges and case to be dismissed “will be addressed with full care and precision,” and pledged his decision will be guided solely by “the good of the state and Israeli society.”

He in the Monday comments admitted that Netanyahu’s move “unsettles many people across different sectors of the public and has sparked considerable debate.”

But Herzog tried to calm rising public anger, dismissing aggressive or heated public discourse as having “no impact” on his judgment.

PM Netanyahu formally submitted the pardon request to Herzog on Sunday, sparking opposition backlash demanding that the president quickly shoot it down. Local media says that Netanyahu’s request immediately unleashed a firestorm of controversy, as it was accompanied with another denial that’s he’s guilty:

As if the country were not already laboring under enough legal and constitutional crises, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took Israel into a new minefield on Sunday when he filed a request to President Isaac Herzog asking for a pardon for the criminal charges against him in the three cases for which he is currently standing trial.

In a brief, personal letter to Herzog, Netanyahu made the case that bringing the trial to a close would benefit the public by ending national divisions over his prosecution.

He then published a message pledging to heal the nation’s divides should his trial be halted, but in the same breath enflamed the rift by arguing that not only is he innocent but that the he’d been framed and the indictment against him was concocted by hostile elements in law enforcement agencies.

Indeed he took the denial further by saying he’d been ‘framed’ by his political enemies. Thus if Herzog were to suddenly go along with dismissing the case, outrage among the opposition as well as long-running anti-Netanyahu protests in the streets related to handling the hostage crisis in Gaza would explode.

Times of Israel concludes of the dilemma, “Rather, experts say, it is Netanyahu’s glaring omission of an admission of guilt or wrongdoing that puts his request on legally shaky ground, making it highly unlikely that president will grant him an outright pass, and inviting the possibility of court intervention if he does.”

Back in January, Netanyahu began interrogation sessions connected to a series of cases – all of which he’s asserted his innocence in. For a review:

• Case 1000 concerns allegations that Netanyahu and his wife accepted luxury gifts, such as cigars and champagne, from wealthy businessmen in exchange for political favors.
• Case 2000 involves claims that Netanyahu negotiated with Arnon Mozes, publisher of Yedioth Ahronoth, to secure more favorable press coverage.
• Case 4000 — viewed as the most serious — centers on accusations that Netanyahu provided regulatory and financial benefits to Shaul Elovitch, the former owner of the Walla news site and Bezeq telecommunications, in return for positive media treatment.

Netanyahu has also long faced accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity – but pressure over this has mainly been on the international and European front, related to international criminal court probes. President Trump has still firmly had his back, and has weighed in vocally in the case, asking Israel to dismiss all charges.

Republicans will hold onto Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District despite a push by Democrats to flip the deep-red seat, the Associated Press projected Tuesday, as Republican candidate Matt Van Epps was set to defeat Democrat Aftyn Behn.

The former state commissioner and Army helicopter pilot defeated the Democratic nominee, Aftyn Behn, with 53.9 percent of the vote in the highly publicized race, according to The Associated Press as of 9:45 p.m. ET. Behn had 45.1 percent, with nearly all votes counted. 

The high-stakes election was neck and neck ahead of election day, as an Emerson College Polling/The Hill survey released on Nov. 26 showed Epps slightly ahead with 48 percent of voter support in the district and Behn with 46 percent. As always, the highly biased, vote suppressing poll came out largely in favor of the Democrat who is set to lose by almost 10 points. 

Tuesday’s special election, held after the resignation of Republican Rep. Mark Green, drew nationwide attention and was widely viewed as a referendum on President Trump. The president endorsed Van Epps during the primaries, participated in a phone rally for the GOP candidate on the eve of the election and congratulated him on Tuesday evening.

More than 43,000 ballots were submitted during the early voting period, according to the Tennessee Division of Elections.

The congressman-elect, originally from Ohio, will represent 14 counties in Middle Tennessee—including downtown Nashville—after the seat was left vacant by Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), who retired over the summer to take a job in the private sector.

Tuesday night’s win in the Deep South, which President Donald Trump won by more than 20 points in 2024, helps the Republicans maintain hold of their slim majority in the U.S. House, which is expected to shrink once again on Jan. 5, 2026, when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) resigns. Before the Trump-endorsed candidate was elected, the 119th Congress had 219 Republicans, 213 Democrats, and three vacancies.

The result is a boon for Trump and his party, which had worried that its narrow House majority would grow even slimmer. But the relatively tight margin in such a deep-red district nonetheless represents a warning shot about the party’s vulnerabilities heading into the 2026 midterm elections. 

Trump carried the seat by 22 percentage points a little over a year ago. The Seventh Congressional District, which stretches from Kentucky to Alabama and includes part of downtown Nashville, had been drawn by G.O.P. state lawmakers specifically to elect a Republican.

As the Epoch Times reports, Epps’s win comes after the GOP flooded Tennessee with a multi-county, boots-on-the-ground effort to gain as much support as possible in the 24 hours ahead of the election.

On Monday, Epps headlined a morning rally in Franklin and an evening rally in Clarksville, which featured appearances by party powerhouses such as Speaker of the U.S. House Mike Johnson (R-La.), Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters, and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.).

Epps’s win comes after the GOP flooded Tennessee with a multi-county, boots-on-the-ground effort to gain as much support as possible in the 24 hours ahead of the election.

On Monday, Epps headlined a morning rally in Franklin and an evening rally in Clarksville, which featured appearances by party powerhouses such as Speaker of the U.S. House Mike Johnson (R-La.), Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters, and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.).

Epps promised to advance Trump’s MAGA agenda, fix the economy, bring manufacturing back to America, secure borders, keep transgender athletes out of women’s sports, and protect farmers.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright has floated an unusual but very creative plan to quickly expand U.S. grid capacity: tapping the industrial diesel generators already sitting at data centers, big-box retailers, and other commercial sites. The proposal comes as multiple regional grids strain under the explosive power demand driven by the data-center boom. Leveraging these idled generators could serve as a short-term bridge until new generation comes online.

Bloomberg quoted Wright on Tuesday morning at the North American Gas Forum in Washington, where he said that tapping the nation’s idled fleet of industrial diesel generators could add the equivalent of about 35 nuclear power plants’ worth of electricity and help bridge the country until new natural-gas and nuclear generation comes online in the coming years.

Wright emphasized the scale of the opportunity, saying, “We’re going to unleash that 35 gigawatts of capacity that sits there today,” though he noted that pollution rules have historically limited generator use.

He argued that the massive data-center buildout over the next few years could be primarily supported by these existing generators, avoiding the need for dozens of new power plants.

These generators, he said, are already deployed at data centers and commercial sites nationwide. “They’re all around the country. It’s going to start with communicating to everyone that these assets exist.”

Wright and the Trump administration understand that power grids are stretched thin in the era of data centers. The push for dispatchable backup generation is a short-term solution for all the missing power needed for the AI boom…

Wow:

“In 2025-28, we project ~57 gigawatts (GW) of US data center power demand, and we quantify available power capacity to serve this demand as: near-term grid access of ~12-15 GW, plus ~6 GW of data centers under construction, resulting in a ~36 GW shortfall of US power… pic.twitter.com/4PArdYY9qO

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 16, 2024

Perhaps by the time the 2030s arrive, new natural-gas generators and other reliable sources will finally add enough capacity to meet booming demand. Nuclear remains more of a next-decade story. And now, Wright may truly be onto something.

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

The US Department of War insisted on Tuesday that it’s not waging a “forever war” in Somalia despite the fact that the Trump administration has shattered the record for annual airstrikes in the country.

Liam Cosgrove, a reporter for ZeroHedge, noted during a Pentagon press briefing on Tuesday that the US has launched 101 airstrikes (now 102) in Somalia and that US troops reportedly conducted a recent ground raid, and asked why the US military is still in the country.

“I can assure you this is an America First Department of War and president, so we aren’t conducting forever wars in Somalia, we aren’t seeking regime change, and we’re not nation building,” Pentagon spokeswoman Kingsley Wilson said in reply.

The Trump administration has dramatically escalated the US war in Somalia, launching more than 10 times the number of airstrikes that the US conducted in 2024, and more than the combined total of airstrikes launched during the 12 years that Presidents Obama and Biden were in office. Despite the unprecedented scale of US strikes, Kingsley described the campaign as “narrowly scoped.”

She told Cosgrove, “I will say that this Department’s narrowly scoped, intelligence-driven, counterintelligence operations in places like Somalia, alongside our partners, allow us to protect the American homeland from terrorist threats and to protect our interests.”

US airstrikes this year have targeted a small ISIS affiliate based in caves in Somalia’s northeastern Puntland region and al-Shabaab in southern and central Somalia.

The US has been fighting al-Shabaab since it backed an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006, which ousted the Islamic Courts Union, a coalition of Muslim groups that briefly held power in Mogadishu after taking the capital from CIA-backed warlords.

Pentagon asked why the US military is still in Somalia

‘I can assure you this is an America First Department of War and president, so we aren’t conducting forever wars in Somalia, we’re not seeking regime change or nation building’ pic.twitter.com/yrnXb7riSe

— Avinash K S🇮🇳 (@AvinashKS14) December 2, 2025

Al-Shabaab was the radical offshoot of the Islamic Courts Union and claimed its first attack in 2007, which targeted Ethiopian troops occupying Mogadishu.

In 2012, al-Shabaab declared loyalty to al-Qaeda, after years of fighting the US and its proxies. The ISIS affiliate in Somalia first emerged in 2015 as an offshoot of al-Shabaab, and is believed to have only a few hundred members.

We’ve already pointed out that money isn’t the problem in America’s unprecedented data center construction buildout. Big Tech’s AI capex splurge is effectively endless thanks to “circle-jerk” vendor-financing schemes, and land is plentiful.

The real bottleneck? First, it was power – or rather, the lack of it – as the grid struggles to hook up hyperscalers sprinting toward ever larger and more power-hungry AI server racks.

True.

That is why Bitcoin is based on energy: you can issue fake fiat currency, and every government in history has done so, but it is impossible to fake energy.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 14, 2025

Beyond a power grid already stretched thin due to limited capacity, the Trump administration is now scrambling to fix this with an accelerated nuclear push before the 2030s. We’ve identified another problem that central bankers can’t print their way out of: skilled labor. And no, we’re not talking about the need for cheap, unskilled migrant labor. We’re talking about a highly skilled workforce required to build, run, and maintain data centers, as well as expand the power grid and operate nuclear power plants. 

Wow:

“In 2025-28, we project ~57 gigawatts (GW) of US data center power demand, and we quantify available power capacity to serve this demand as: near-term grid access of ~12-15 GW, plus ~6 GW of data centers under construction, resulting in a ~36 GW shortfall of US power… pic.twitter.com/4PArdYY9qO

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 16, 2024

In early October, Goldman noted that data center buildouts will require an additional 300,000 workers across manufacturing, construction, and operations to meet power demand by the end of the decade.

And then there is the issue of where the US gets 300,000 engineers to build all this missing power supply by 2030 https://t.co/a18crhqZ4v pic.twitter.com/tinW8SHDwM

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 14, 2025

Now, Goldman analysts led by Carly Davenport are telling clients that the power industry will need over 500,000 new workers by 2030 to meet the surging electricity demand from data centers and the broader economy-wide electrification push.

Davenport explained:

“The US power industry is poised to require >500,000 new workers by 2030 or a significant acceleration in labor productivity. This growth enters a labor force already facing strain from aging and a limited pipeline of skilled labor. Labor-demand challenges to meet levels of US power-demand growth not seen since the 1990s are rising amid the Demographic Dilemma — a shrinking productive labor pool tasked to support an aging population — which raises the risk of G7 labor-force strains. This is elevating investor/corporate debates on industry execution and whether/when rising power, equipment, and labor costs could constrain growth.”

Generational growth to achieve 2.6% CAGR in electricity demand through 2030 could require ~510,000 US power and grid jobs (a 28% increase versus the 2023 US energy workforce).

“We estimate the need for ~300,000 incremental jobs across manufacturing, construction, and operations/maintenance (Exhibit 10)…

…plus an additional 207,000 across US transmission and distribution (Exhibit 11).“

What’s critical to understand is that the trillions in investment flooding into the economy through the 2030s will require far more than steel, concrete, silicon chips, and copper wire. They will demand a massive expansion of highly skilled workers.

Right now, there is a terrible oversupply of college-educated workers and a deepening shortage of talent for non-degree, hands-on jobs – a widening gap highlighted in a recent Goldman note by analyst Evan Tylenda.

Our advice for young people struggling to find a real job: ditch the useless gender-studies degree and learn a trade that’s becoming increasingly valuable to “Powering America.” For college students who haven’t been brainwashed by Marxism and wokism, aim for fields that will actually matter, such as engineering, energy systems, and nuclear science – all of which will be in red-hot demand in the 2030s.

The labor market is shifting fast. It’s time to move with it and choose a career that won’t be automated into oblivion anytime soon.

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

If each of these is not a part of any ‘reform,’ than all that is being done is pouring money into a monopolizing cartel, just in a slightly different way.

Unbeknownst to those of us with little inside knowledge of the complex financial plumbing of the US healthcare system, healthcare is in a death spiral that will surprise everyone but insiders who grasp the system’s unsustainability.

To help us outsiders understand the death spiral, I asked a senior MD to guide us through “follow the money.”

Trump Blasts “Big, Fat, Rich Insurance Companies” As Lawmakers Propose Ways To ‘Fix’ Obamacare.

Since this is the issue of the day and it falls within my expertise, here are some thoughts.

Executive Summary

Multiple conditions are aligning for a broad re-alignment of medical care delivery in the US, resulting in the development of a two-tiered delivery model: high-quality, efficient, innovating cash-pay for those who can pay and low-quality, wait-rationed care delivery for those who can’t.

If you can’t afford it, don’t get sick.

Health systems make their money through inflated commercial real estate (CRE), sale of patient health information (PHI), consolidation of supply chains, and kickbacks in exchange for redirecting federal dollars. Absent a tiny sliver of procedures, the delivery of healthcare itself is a loss leader. It is a requirement for entry, not a source of value. As such, care delivery managed to prevent loss, not promote innovation.

Most health system CEOs are financial engineers, not care delivery specialists, and compare the size of their real estate management infrastructure with their care delivery management infrastructure; the former is always much more robust than the latter.

Insurers have become utilities, administering government payment programs. Their ability to bear risk as a business model was discarded with the ACA; they no longer have the infrastructure or talent to do so. You might as well ask them to make shoes.

This monoculture, the corruption of monopoly and finally the response to the pandemic has crippled both.

Health systems faced a profound interruption in throughput which they dealt with by tapping reserves, inflating CRE further, pushing the boundaries of PHI sales, increasing their kickback programs, and, most importantly, becoming fully dependent on the now ending government bailouts.

Further consolidation and partnering with private money is their only path forward. Recent experience teaches that the private money will cut the delivery of healthcare to the bare minimum needed to maximize the other sources of value. A whole lot of administrators and c-suiters are also going to lose their jobs.

After the ACA, the Insurer’s only cash cow was the immensely overfunded and fraud-filled Value-Based Care (VBC) Medicare and Medicaid programs such as Medicare Advantage. The fraud is now being criminally prosecuted, the overpayments are gone, and the cost of care delayed during the pandemic and which the insurers now bear are being realized manifold.

Insurers simply have no path forward other than as payment administrators. Look for massive consolidation, starting with the individual Blues. The government has been resistant, but now it’s a choice of merger or bankruptcy. In 2028 probably only Coventry, United, and Centene will be left standing, no more blues.

The ACA itself is in a death spiral. Envisioned as a universal mandatory risk pool, so many exceptions have been made that only the sickest and those who have no choice get their care there, the former being subsidized by the latter, the government, and ever dwindling coverage. The pandemic subsidies masked it and without them the coverage is non-sensical. Non-participation will be its end.

In addition, government medical care programs have long been subsidized by suppressing payment for the resources used to obtain care delivery; clinicians, labor, administration, and even bedpans. Real wages for even the highest paying doctors working within the system haven’t increased since 2010, nursing wages have gone up only because so many have become free-lancing agency workers. I got offered a locums position for $145/hour, the same as I was offered 8 years ago.

All those resources are now worth more outside the system than inside. Thus, those resources are migrating to the cash-pay market. Used to be the huge government market and dependable payments was enough to overcome the difference in value between the two markets, cash vs third party. No longer.

The legacy costs, management/leadership expertise and business models of current Fee For Service (FFS) health systems preclude all but the most highly branded health systems from competing in the cash-pay model.

Access to the cash-pay market will vary based on jurisdiction: it’s illegal in some states, hamstrung by others, free in still more.

Look for policy to evolve into a high-dollar, deductible, roll-over Health Savings Account (HSA) with income-based subsidies paired with a government subsidized catastrophic care program. At least until the young and disaffected elect a socialist.

A $2,000 direct payment to beneficiaries such as being currently contemplated is completely ineffectual, especially since it has to be borrowed and will just increase inflation that much further.

True reform must include:

1.Invalidation of state and federal laws which restrict cash-pay.

2. Prohibition of not-for-profit (NFP) / Religious organizations from third-party payment programs. The competitive advantage of the tax-free business model and the inherent corruption it has engendered render their participation not in the public interest.

3. Removal of restrictions on clinician ownership in healthcare delivery.

4. Renewed criminal anti-trust enforcement in medical care delivery.

Others can be added, but if each of these is not a part of any ‘reform,’ than all that is being done is pouring money into a monopolizing cartel, just in a slightly different way.

No improvement will occur.

It’s not payments which need reform, it’s delivery.

And a lot of folks’ paychecks depend on obfuscating that fact.

Thank you, senior MD for the guided tour of healthcare’s financial death spiral. I have long stated that healthcare in its current extractive-cartel form will bankrupt the nation all by itself:

Why America’s Healthcare (Sickcare) System Is Broken and Unfixable (July 16, 2014)

Sickcare Will Bankrupt the Nation (March 21, 2011)

My questions:

1. Is any of this financial plumbing actually private insurance, or is it all just sluicing government funding through a profitable skimming operation?

2. How can a ‘healthcare’ system that refuses to connect digital derangement, ultra-processed diet and poor fitness to ‘health’ possibly generate ‘health’ as an output?

These questions are taboo because the answers would implode the entire system.

Medicare costs: parabolic:

Medicaid costs: parabolic:

*  *  *

My new book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free)

A Boeing E-6B Mercury operated by the U.S. Navy, one of the service’s airborne nuclear command posts commonly known as the “Doomsday plane,” disappeared from civilian flight-tracking platforms Friday morning while operating over the Atlantic Ocean, according to tracking data, the Daily Mail reports.

The aircraft, using callsign AFD FE2, was last observed on ADS-B Exchange and similar services around 8:30 a.m. EST approximately 60 miles east of Virginia Beach, Virginia. The plane had departed Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland, on a standard southeast track over Chesapeake Bay before its transponder was deactivated.

During TACAMO (Take Charge and Move Out) missions, the E-6B typically enters restricted warning areas, deploys a miles-long trailing-wire antenna, and flies extended racetrack patterns to relay secure communications to U.S. ballistic-missile submarines and other strategic assets, Key Aero reports.

The E-6B fleet also performs the Airborne National Command Post “Looking Glass” mission, equipped with the Airborne Launch Control System (ALCS) capable of transmitting launch orders to silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles if ground command centers are destroyed. An E-6B conducted an ALCS simulated ICBM launch exercise as recently as April.

The Navy and U.S. Strategic Command have not commented on Friday’s flight.

In August, another E-6B was recently forward-deployed to Pituffik Space Base in northern Greenland for what the service claimed was routine operations, including exercises with nuclear submarines in both the Atlantic and Pacific. However, aviation analysts, including Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, described the E-6B aircraft’s flight near Greenland as unusual. Historical E-6B forward operating locations have included Guam, Norway, Germany, Spain, and the U.K., according to Newsweek.

“Naval Strategic Forces conduct global operations in coordination with combatant commands, services, and allies and partner nations, even in the High North,” Commander Jason Fischer, a spokesman for U.S. Submarine Forces, told Newsweek.

Authored by Aaron Gifford via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The nation’s largest teachers union is planning a workshop on “Advancing LGBTQ+ Justice,” prompting criticism from a conservative national parent group that obtained the training handouts and released them to the public ahead of the session.

The National Education Association’s (NEA’s) next Focus Academy session is planned for Dec. 2 to Dec. 4. Participants will “develop a toolset of tactics for dismantling systems of privilege and oppression as it relates to LGBTQ+ educators and students,” the union’s website states.

The union’s national headquarters are in Washington, but the registration page does not disclose an address for the training. Upcoming Focus Academy sessions on advancing “racial justice” and winning school board elections are scheduled for early 2026.

Defending Education, a parent and research organization that opposes progressive curricula and policies such as transgender ideology, critical race theory, and diversity, equity, and inclusion in public schools, obtained and released the handout in November.

“The NEA is the largest teachers’ union in the country, and they have decided to vilify half the country in an upcoming training,” Erika Sanzi, Defending Education’s senior communications director, said in an email sent to The Epoch Times. “As far as they are concerned, the only reasons anyone could oppose their preferred ideologies are racism and transphobia, and they name Republicans as villains, in writing!”

The first section of the materials is a pronoun guide with “tips for using gender-neutral pronouns.”

The next section contains Cornell University’s “Transgender Guide to Transitioning and Gender Affirmation in the Workplace.”

A guide from the National LGBTQ Task Force lists “levels of expression and oppression.” This document is not limited to gender ideology and alleges discrimination against black and Hispanic public school children, immigrants, and women in the workplace.

The NEA’s policy on LGBT employee rights is included in the handout. It includes guidance on a recent Supreme Court ruling determining that parents are allowed to opt their children out of LGBT-related instruction for religious reasons.

“The decision only requires schools to provide opt-outs on the basis of sincerely held religious beliefs and practices,” the guidance states. “It does not require schools to grant opt-outs based on parent/guardian personal, political or ideological beliefs or preferences.”

The last section of the handout, “Transgender Youth and the Freedom to Be Ourselves: Building a Choir With a Race Class Narrative,” was commissioned by the Transgender Law Center. It accuses conservatives of exploiting people who identify as transgender.

“Over the last ten years, Republicans in state legislatures have increasingly turned to anti-transgender rhetoric and legislation as a powerful complement to their arsenal of racist dog whistles used to whip up fear and consolidate power,” the document states.

Defending Education’s position on the NEA materials is that the union wants teachers to train students to become social justice advocates instead of teaching them facts and skills.

“Their federal charter was granted because they promised to elevate the character and advance the interests of the professions of teaching; and to promote the cause of education in the United States,” Sanzi said in an email.

“Seeing as their leadership—and by extension, the organization itself—has morphed into a far-left insane asylum that is actively destroying the cause of education, that charter is no longer defensible.”

The NEA did not respond to a request for comment.

A Hoover, Alabama zoning commission unanimously rejected a rezoning request Monday that would have allowed a Muslim K-12 academy to relocate to an office building in the Birmingham suburb, capping a contentious public hearing that packed roughly 170 residents into the room and erupted with heated testimony over concerns of growing Islamification of the area, 1819 News reports.

The Islamic Academy of Alabama, which has operated in neighboring Homewood since 1995 serving approximately 260 students, sought to move to a larger facility in Hoover’s commercial corridor. The proposal was voted down 7-0 to sustained applause from the crowd of concerned residents.

The town’s commissioners pointed to vehicular congestion in an already-strained commercial corridor and lingering questions about the property’s long-term compatibility as grounds for denial.

John Padgett, whose residential property sits closest to the proposed location, challenged the traffic study’s conclusion that the school would have zero impact on current conditions.

“I see the traffic backed up every morning already,” Padgett reportedly told commissioners. “When they start, if you add a few hundred cars to that, it’s gonna be backed up past the stop sign.“

Padgett recounted a recent incident at an Airbnb next door to his home, carefully prefacing his remarks.

“I want to be very sensitive and careful in the way I say this,” he began, noting that he didn’t want to seem as though he was attacking a particular religion. “They weren’t supposed to have any kind of big parties, but they had an Islamic wedding there.”

Padgett described returning from a trip to find videos from neighbors showing dozens of cars—30 or 40, he estimated—parked throughout the neighborhood, including in his own driveway without permission, blocking his vehicles.

“They drove through my yard. Waving Islamic flags, out the window, and screaming things in Arabic,” he said.

Several attendees brandished signs reading “Give an inch — Dearborn Michigan” and “Stop the 100 year plan”—pointed references to demographic shifts in Dearborn, Michigan, which is home to the largest Muslim population in the United States.

“You’re going to have real problems with this community, I’m just telling you now,” resident Bruce Davis warned commissioners. “There’s going to be an influx of other people that are going to create a problem for this community and we might as well just face it.”

The final public commenter drew applause as the unidentified woman recounted travels through the United Kingdom and issued stark warnings about parallel risks facing the United States. The female speaker described witnessing “the land that gave us the King James Bible, supposedly a Christian nation, overwhelmingly being taken over,” according to 1819 News.

“The Muslims did not assimilate,” she continued. “In fact, the Brits bent backwards to accommodate their demands over and over again, to the level of feeling the second-class citizens in their own country.”

“The citizens could not even voice their grief because it was immediately associated with that type of phobia,” she added. “They gave in an inch and were soon taken for rides, miles away, with no hope of landing back to familiarity.”

Hoover Commission Chairman Mike Wood cut her off, steering the discussion back to zoning criteria. “We are here to look at whether this school was appropriately placed,” he interjected. “We’re not here for that. I’m sorry. We’re not going to listen to that.” The interruption sparked objections from the audience.

Lucas Gambino, who presented the case for the school, pushed back against the city’s objections.

“We’re not here to mislead anybody or trick anybody,” Gambino said, addressing questions about the evolving scope of what was variously described as a community center, prayer center, or auxiliary facility.

Gambino argued against forcing the developer to wait indefinitely for an idealized tenant.

“The idea that holding these 200,000 square feet buildings hostage for a tech buyer to come in and occupy those buildings, when you have a developer that owns those buildings, that’s paying significant carrying costs, on a monthly basis, for those buildings,” Gambino explained. “It’s gonna be asked to sit back and wait for a tech buyer to come in and occupy those buildings.“

Initially, a motion to send the request to the city council without a recommendation was made, but it failed to receive a second. A motion to move the proposal forward with a recommendation to deny it then passed unanimously. The decision now moves to the Hoover City Council, which will likely take up the matter at its first January meeting.