Authored by John MacLeod via The Critic,

We have repressed the memories of the pandemic that changed all of our lives…

It is a little drawer in a cabinet by my bedside and I have not opened it in years. I have to steel myself to open it now. And, yes, they are all there yet in every variety – black, chequered, colourful.

The ear-looped face-coverings behind which I spluttered for two long years, tugging on and off as needs be, as we queued obediently outside supermarkets, danced on and off pavements, or chilled if anyone in the vicinity so much as coughed.

Obediently protecting the NHS by, um, not using it. And, for weeks on end in 2020, biddably stood outside our front gates to hail its endeavours each Thursday evening, clapping our hands and banging saucepans.

The initial weeks of panic, when hand-sanitiser, soap and masks were nowhere to be had. An inexplicable run on toilet-rolls. The later, weird scarcities: flour, yeast, eggs.

On all sides the shuttered shops and restaurants, many of which would never reopen. The funerals you could not go to and the weddings that never happened. Untold rings, accordingly, engraved with the wrong date.

I have the sort of bardic, Highland memory that could immediately tell you something interesting that happened in my life in, say, August 1976 or September 2002. I’d struggle to detail much between March 2020 and April 2022.

Those were months without form, and void. Without the usual milestones of big social occasions and family celebration. In hindsight, they have a nightmarish hue.

I was trapped in Edinburgh shielding two elderly parents, one living with cancer. I lurched out on my lonesome for daily needs and the weekly Big Shop, three debit-cards in my wallet.

In the early weeks – I was fifty-four; had a bit of a tummy – I was wholly resigned to catching Covid; darkly confident I would die. Time and again I washed my hands, till they were raw; sometimes I was tempted to wash the groceries – and I know of households where husbands, returning from such an outing, had to strip in the porch before being granted admittance.

Nicola Sturgeon? Gaw, that woman never seemed to be off the box. Nightly my mother tuned in for her latest and-furthermore-I-say-unto-ye lecturettes, screened live on telly by our reverent broadcasters and without the First Minister’s political rivals granted any part whatsoever.

In a particularly North Korean moment, STV even broadcast online sickly footage of assorted Scottish children mewling, “Thank you, Nicola, for keeping us all safe,” and variants thereof. (It was belatedly pulled, after an outcry.)

I still remember the worst moment. A Saturday evening in October 2020. It had rained all day. Our brief re-opening had ceased after a sustained uptick in infections: the First Minister (who, weeks earlier, had been braying to all Europe how Scotland had eliminated coronavirus) had announced a “16-day re-set” with renewed restrictions.

So successful was the16-day re-set it lasted till the spring of 2022. That October evening – I could not return to my own home; I was totally trapped; my parents had been in particularly foul temper that day – I stood at the kitchen sink and wept.

Weeks later, it was announced that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine had been successfully trialled. Great-grandparents were enjoying their first armfuls by Christmas.

I had my own in March 2021 – for which I had to motor home, at last, to my Hebridean lair, by sleepy streets and through a deserted countryside, past fraying posters for 2020 Highland Games and agricultural shows that had never taken place.

I never caught coronavirus. Nor did my parents, nor either of my brothers. Even in my widest social circle, I only know of four people who died – all of them infected in hospital or care-home settings, and who may well have died with it rather than of it. In a national emergency that bore most brutally on schoolchildren and young adults, the average age of Covid mortality was eighty-two.

The abiding sense that Britain had a particularly awful pandemic under a particularly useless Government is not fair. We were among the first countries to have a reliable test for Covid-19. Humiliated the EU with our rapid development, testing and rollout of an effective vaccine.

Our world-leading research early identified useful treatments. (One, Remdesivir, in October 2020 might well have saved President Trump’s life.)

In terms of excess deaths, we fared better than Italy, Spain, Greece, the United States and indeed most of central and eastern Europe. Five European nations did worse than us: eight better.

Britain had three vulnerabilities: considerable population density, especially in England; a high BAME population, many in cultures of extended family in crowded homes; and, in London Heathrow, the world’s busiest international airport.

Yet appalling British mistakes were made and Sweden, which refused to lock down, had the lowest excess deaths of all.

Haplessly, back in 2011 and when detailed plans were laid, we had prepared for the wrong pandemic – influenza.

You might think flu and Covid much of a muchness. There are key differences. Flu has a briefer incubation period. It is potentially dangerous to children and in a bad year – our last was 2018 – can carry off over 30,000 people. (In 2020, seven British children of nine or younger died of flu: only three succumbed to Covid-19.)

Bluntly, more children, trapped out of sight in awful family situations, were ‘murdered’ as a consequence of coronavirus than would die of it.

There had been two fundamental mistakes.

One was that we were rather slow to grasp that many with Covid had no symptoms – after we had blithely decanted thousands of elderly hospital patients into eventide homes.

The other was the belief, in the early months, that Covid-19 was primarily spread by “fomites”. Things you touched that infected people had touched.

That’s certainly true of maladies like norovirus – the winter vomiting bug – but, in fact, coronavirus is essentially an airborne respiratory infection.

We would have been far better throwing our windows open and did have one great stroke of luck: the spring and summer of 2020 were exceptionally fine.

It took me time, after it was all over, to unlearn some habits, like raising my left hand in me-Tarzan-you-Jane greeting as I was being served in shops – the mask denied staff the dazzle of my disarming smile – or daring to press buttons on cash-machines and at pedestrian-crossings with a naked finger, rather than using the “Covid key” that long dangled from my belt.

Yet by the late summer of 2022, even as normality resumed, the public clamoured for vengeance and the most convenient scapegoat was Boris Johnson

Toppled hastily from power not on account of Covid misjudgements, but revelations as to how life in No 10 – at the height of the pandemic – had become something of a wine-fuelled Lower Sixth disco.

A far more extraordinary aspect of Covid-19 is how comprehensively it has been forgotten.

Most great affairs of moment are immortalised in our culture, and often for many years. Our broadcasters were still making Second World War dramas in the Eighties. John F Kennedy’s presidency and murder yet shift books and films. The 1936 Abdication crisis remains a lucrative cottage-industry for authors and screenwriters.

But there are no coronavirus movies. There may be no poems and novels – in stark contrast to the Aids pandemic, wherein more young Americans died than had fallen in Vietnam, and whose notable British casualties alone included everyone from Derek Jarman, to Freddie Mercury, to Bruce Chatwin.

There was much related fiction, drama and cinema, and as recently as 2021 we had Russell T Davies’s powerful Channel 4 drama, It’s A Sin.

But Aids – and this is in no way to belittle its victims, or those who loved them – tended to endanger a specific demographic. It was precisely because Covid-19 terrified the bejapers out of all of us that it has been collectively repressed as a memory.

Incredibly, given the huge decisions made around it and how these blew up our economy, the pandemic, its handling and those decisions were not even points for discussion at the 2024 general election.

There is an evident reluctance, too, in high places to discuss Covid-19’s origins – likely, far more sinister than some random in Wuhan nipping out for bat and chips.

And there is, in fact, a precedent for this strange amnesia.

The so-called Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19, all the worse because it coincided with the last vital months of the Great War and the vast transport of American troops, killed – globally – some thirty million people.

At a conservative estimate, at least 550,000 Americans – 195,000 of them in just thirty-one days. In October 1918 11,000 perished in Philadelphia. The city ran out of coffins: at night, corpses were collected from porches by horse and cart, in scenes straight out of the Black Death.

In my late father’s native district on the isle of Lewis, forty people died in just five weeks, with four or five funerals every day. In a village further south, that November, my maternal grandfather lost a beloved sister to “influenzial pneumonia”.

That influenza – first noted in Kansas, brought to Europe by sniffling American doughboys and mutating to new horror amidst the filth and decay of the Western Front – was of special dread because it could kill with extraordinary speed and, rather than the very young or the very old, most who died were in their twenties – husky youths and bonny lasses, in the very prime of life.

“If the epidemic continues its mathematical rate of acceleration,” physician Victor Vaughan chilled that dreadful autumn, “civilisation could easily disappear from the face of the Earth.”

It did not, of course. By 1919 it was already in retreat and by March 1920 had burned itself out: like pandemics everywhere, it simply ran out of people to infect.

But there is no Spanish flu fiction. There was no subsequent cinema. It is remembered within families – earlier this summer, my 94 year-old uncle spoke sorrowfully of that aunt he had never known – but, collectively, and as a society, we wiped that tape.

“It is in the individual memory of a great many of us,” author Alfred W Crosby mused in 1998, “but it is not in the collective memory. That for me is the greatest mystery, how we could have forgotten anything so horrendous – so massively horrendous, which killed so many of us.

“Why was our reaction to forget it? So awful, so frightening, people just got rid of the memory. But it always lingers there, as a kind of uneasiness.”

Like those masks in my drawer – clung to, still, just in case…

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.

How much of your paycheck would a pension replace in retirement?

Depending on the country, the answer ranges from more than 80% to less than 20%.

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Dorothy Neufeld, ranks countries by their projected gross pension replacement rate, based on data from the OECD. The rate compares pension benefits with pre-retirement earnings, with both measured before taxes and contributions.

Estimates are for an average earner entering the workforce at age 22 in 2024 and include mandatory public and private pensions, but exclude voluntary private retirement savings.

Spain Leads the Ranking

Southern European countries dominate the top of the ranking, with Spain, Greece, Portugal, and Italy all placing in the top 10. Spain and Greece stand out at 80.4% and 79.6%, respectively.

National prosperity is not a reliable predictor of pension replacement rates. Mexico and Türkiye are both near 70%, while Germany stands at 42.1% and the U.S. at 39.7%, reflecting substantial differences in how national retirement systems are structured.

At the bottom, Lithuania’s replacement rate is just 17.4%, less than one-quarter of Spain’s 80.4%. South Korea and Japan also rank relatively low, at 33.4% and 36.5%, respectively.

Where Low Pensions Meet High Senior Poverty

A low replacement rate does not automatically mean high senior poverty, but several countries near the bottom of the pension ranking also have elevated old-age poverty rates. In Lithuania, more than 20% of people aged 65 and older live in relative income poverty.

The pattern extends across the Baltics. Old-age poverty exceeds 30% in Estonia and Latvia, compared with an OECD average of 14.8%. In the U.S., the rate is also relatively high at 22.9%.

At the other extreme, the Netherlands combines a 74.7% replacement rate with an old-age poverty rate of just 4.6%. Denmark, Finland, and Norway also have poverty rates at or below 5%.

Replacement rates are only one part of retirement security, but these comparisons show how differently pension systems replace workers’ earnings across the OECD.

To learn more about this topic, check out this graphic on the annual cost of retirement by state.

Authored by – Remix News Staff – via Remix News,

A suspected underworld revenge attack linked to fugitive drug trafficker Jos Leijdekkers, known as “Bolle Jos,” left a security guard dead and two police officers wounded in the quiet Dutch village of Overasselt in the early hours of Sept. 1, 2026.

Surveillance cameras captured vans full of masked men carrying assault rifles during the attack, which is raising fears that Netherlands is devolving into a narco-state.

🇳🇱🔴 JUST IN: Shocking footage shows 1 security guard murdered and 2 police officers wounded in the Netherlands.

Dozens of armed drug gang members opened fire in the small Dutch town of Overasselt.

Footage shows multiple vans filled with masked men armed with assault rifles…. pic.twitter.com/ShudqYyHFg

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) September 2, 2026

Around 4:00 a.m., two vans pulled up and a large group approached a farmhouse previously tied to a drug lab. The surveillance footage shows the group approaching a parked car with its interior light on. Five shots were then fired, according to the Dutch police report on the incident.

A 51-year-old man from nearby Wijchen, hired as a security guard after an earlier attack on the property, was murdered. Neighbors reported hearing dozens of shots, with one neighbor telling Dutch media he heard 37 shots before police arrived.

The first officers responding to a report of a suspicious situation came under immediate fire. Colleagues dragged the wounded officers to safety while still being shot at. One officer initially suffered life-threatening injuries; both were later reported out of danger.

Police launched a nationwide manhunt involving helicopters, dogs, special intervention units, and roadblocks on the A73 and A76. Warning shots were fired during searches of cornfields, gardens, and other sites. The operation led to the arrest of 34 suspects at multiple locations, including a cornfield near the scene, Nijmegen train station, and highways in Limburg. The suspects included Dutch, Belgian, French, and Algerian nationals. Weapons, vehicles, and data carriers were seized. A large-scale investigation team (TGO) has now been formed, with all detainees remaining in custody.

The incredible violence has sparked reactions all the way from local police officials to the country’s justice minister.

Deputy Police Chief of the East Netherlands unit Jolanda Aalbers described the night as “indescribable.”

“For colleagues this is a truly intense incident. Colleagues were wounded and they were brought to safety by other colleagues at risk to their own lives. It was a real act of heroism. We are grateful that the wounded colleagues are out of life-threatening condition.”

Justice Minister David van Weel condemned “horrible violence” and said “we do not tolerate this,” according to Dutch news outlet NOS. He also described the scale of the violence as “unprecedented” for the Netherlands. “The fact that you have hordes of dozens of young people walking through the streets of a village and immediately opening fire on the police is unprecedented and new,” he said. He spoke of a suspected criminal settling of accounts involving international drug cartels that operate across borders.

Deputy Chief Prosecutor Monique Vinkesteijn called it a “long-running conflict.” She said that suspects face charges including murder or manslaughter, attempted murder, conspiracy, and preparation of a kidnapping. She described ten different crime scenes, underlining the sprawling and complex nature of the crime. She said investigators were working to link each suspect to specific locations.

Mayor Joerie Minses of Heumen municipality, which includes Overasselt, called the violence “un-Dutch,” “completely unacceptable,” and something that “goes beyond all bounds.”

“What happened last night does not fit Overasselt,” he stated.

He now says he may want to close the farmhouse entirely, which has a documented history of trouble.

In 2019, a professional drug lab was found in shipping containers near the farmhouse after a fire. In 2024, armed men were found at the gate of the house.

In July 2025, an attacker fired at least 25 rounds from an AK-47-style rifle at the house, resulting in the conviction of a 21-year-old from Amsterdam. Residents then hired private security.

What sparked the latest attack?

There are now questions about what prompted such a large-scale attack from the drug gangs. Dutch media, citing police sources, linked the attack to a dispute over an 812-kilogram cocaine shipment seized on Aug. 29 at the French-Spanish border. The drugs were in a Dutch-registered truck traveling from Africa via Portugal.

The masked gang members may have been seeking a missing portion of the load or confronting an intermediary connected to Leijdekkers’ network. Leijdekkers, one of the Netherlands’ most-wanted fugitives, has been convicted in both the Netherlands and Belgium, including a 14-year sentence in the Belgian Costa case involving Antwerp port cocaine trafficking. He faces decades in prison for other crimes as well. He is believed to be in West Africa. Police have not officially confirmed the Leijdekkers link.

Authored by Philippe Lemieux via Mises Institute,

Liberty’s history is often presented as a direct consequence of the Enlightenment: inherited authority was subjected to reason, persecution gave way to toleration, monarchy to constitutional government, and privilege to individual rights. In this account, classical liberalism leads naturally to Austrian economics and modern libertarianism. That sequence is useful but incomplete.

Liberty developed through the convergence of two lineages. The first is the modern lineage of Enlightenment criticism, which required political power to justify itself before reason. The second is an older realist tradition, running from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas through the School of Salamanca, Richard Cantillon, Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, and Murray Rothbard. These thinkers did not form a single school, nor did they agree on every question. What connects them is a shared orientation: reality has an intelligible order, human action has a structure, and political power cannot be abolished either by command.

The relevant difference is not between the Enlightenment as a whole and an older tradition, nor between reason and faith. Important currents within the Enlightenment, especially the Scottish Enlightenment, recognized that custom, law, money, and markets could arise without deliberate design. The deeper conflict is between a constructivist current within modern thought and an older causal-realist approach to social order. Friedrich Hayek identified the pinnacle of this constructivism as the “fatal conceit,” the erroneous belief that man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes. The realist tradition emphasizes the intelligibility and causal structure of social phenomena, while the constructivist tendency places greater confidence in deliberate organization and direction.

The danger appeared when criticism of inherited institutions hardened into confidence in consciously-designed ones. Locke was not Marx, and constitutional government was not socialism. The continuity lies in method: once social order is treated primarily as an artifact of design, political disagreement increasingly turns on the identity of the designer, the objective of the plan, and the permitted range of control. This tendency appears in social planning, price controls, central banking, licensing, regulation, and the administrative management of economic life.

The older lineage begins from a different premise. Aristotle started with beings as they are and the ends toward which they tend. Human beings choose, deliberate, employ means, form households, exchange goods, and enter associations. Thomas Aquinas carried this realism into law and politics. A command does not become just simply because a ruler issues it. Human law derives its normative order from principles that political authority does not itself create.

Many late Scholastics, particularly the Spanish Scholastics associated with Salamanca, extended this framework to property, exchange, money, and political authority. They increasingly identified the just price with common estimation, shaped by utility, scarcity, and market conditions, rather than with an objective measure of production costs. By situating economic phenomena within moral agency and commutative justice, they placed limits on the arbitrary exercise of political authority in economic life. Within this tradition, thinkers such as Juan de Mariana also articulated strong limits on taxation, confiscation, and monetary debasement.

Richard Cantillon advanced this analysis by placing entrepreneurship, uncertainty, production, and market-price formation near the center of economic life. Merchants and retailers bought at known or fixed prices and later sold at prices they could not foresee, while farmers committed themselves to fixed rents without knowing what their output would command. Profit, loss, and bankruptcy therefore arose from judgment under changing conditions of demand, competition, weather, and consumer preference.

Carl Menger marked a decisive transition within the Austrian tradition. Much of British classical economics, especially in the Ricardian tradition, explained long-run exchange value primarily through labor and production costs. Menger instead began with human needs and with the economizing individual’s knowledge of, and command over, goods capable of satisfying those needs. Value was not a substance stored inside an object; it arose from the relation between an individual, his needs, and the goods available to him. Market phenomena therefore had to be traced to individual judgments, choices, and exchanges. Prices, money, and other social institutions could emerge from economizing activity even when no one intended the resulting order.

Böhm-Bawerk extended the analysis to capital and time. For him, social or productive capital consists of intermediate goods used in time-consuming processes of production before final consumer goods become available.

Mises generalized the Austrian insight through praxeology, making economics part of a broader science of human action. The starting point was not an aggregate, a class, or a governmental objective; it was the acting individual employing scarce means to attain chosen ends. Exchange, prices, profit, loss, money, capital, and production are intelligible only within this structure of purposeful conduct. Mises presented praxeology as an a priori science grounded in the category of human action, with implications that could be developed through deductive reasoning independently of particular historical experience.

The extent to which this epistemology should be understood as Kantian, however, is contested. Jörg Guido Hülsmann has argued that Mises is better understood as a representative of Aristotelian realism. Although Mises employed the language of the a priori, Hülsmann points to the method of Mises’s actual economic analysis, which repeatedly seeks to identify the nature and necessary relations of economic phenomena. Hülsmann therefore places him within the broader Austrian realist tradition of Menger and Böhm-Bawerk, arguing that his affinities with Kant should not be overstated. On this reading, Mises occupies an intermediate position within the lineage developed here: his epistemological vocabulary is partly Kantian, while the substance of his economic analysis retains an important Aristotelian-realist character.

Mises’s critique of socialism demonstrated the practical consequences of this method. Socialist calculation does not fail merely because officials are corrupt, uninformed, or unintelligent. It fails because abolishing private ownership in the means of production eliminates genuine exchange in capital goods. Without exchange, there are no market prices through which planners can compare competing uses of resources by means of monetary calculation.

A planning authority may collect technical information, issue targets, and assign accounting figures. Such figures, however, are not exchange ratios generated by transactions among separate owners. A statistical table can describe quantities, but it cannot determine whether steel should be used for bridges, machinery, railways, or buildings in a way that responds to consumer demand and alternative costs. The defect is not located in the personality of the planner; it is built into the institutional structure of the system.

Rothbard brought this lineage to its most systematic political conclusion. He combined Austrian value theory, capital theory, and economic calculation with a broader theory of natural law, natural rights, property, and the state. His philosophical foundation differed from Mises’s. Rothbard retained the praxeological method of deduction but interpreted the action axiom from an Aristotelian-Thomistic epistemological standpoint, grounding it in the nature of reality rather than in Mises’s neo-Kantian conception of the action axiom as an a priori category of thought.

Rothbard also rejected the convenient story that economics began with Adam Smith and advanced in a straight line toward modern science. In his history of economic thought, he restored the Spanish Scholastics, Cantillon, the French liberal tradition, and other neglected thinkers to a central place, arguing that their contributions had been obscured by the later dominance of British classical economics.

The administrative state shows what happens when the emancipatory language of the Enlightenment is separated from the limits imposed by human action, scarcity, property, and economic calculation. It speaks the language of rights while turning rights into permissions. It recognizes property and permits markets while reserving the power to direct their use through zoning, licensing, taxation, monetary policy, and regulation. It preserves elections while transferring decisions to agencies, central banks, and experts. The system remains liberal in vocabulary and managerial in operation. Failure is treated not as evidence of institutional limits but as proof that the machinery requires another adjustment, a new rule, a larger staff, or a wider jurisdiction.

The history of liberty, therefore, is not the story of one Enlightenment becoming more consistent, but of two converging lineages. One challenged inherited authority; the other emphasized the limits that human action, causality, property, and economic calculation impose on deliberate construction. Austrian economics stands where they meet. Social order emerges through individual action, exchange, calculation, and cooperation under conditions that no central authority can fully command.

A dispute over a record sale escalated into threats and an alleged attempt to set a Portland record shop on fire, according to prosecutors.

Adrian Orange, 40, is accused of confronting the owner of Vinyl Resting Place in St. Johns on Aug. 27 after the store declined to purchase records he brought in, according to KATU ABC. Court documents say Orange threatened the owner, calling him a “dead man.”

Investigators say Orange later returned after the door had been locked, placed newspaper beneath the entrance, poured lighter fluid on it and ignited it.

A woman from a neighboring business intervened and extinguished the flames after Orange walked away. Authorities say he threatened her as well.

The KATU report says about 15 minutes later, Orange allegedly returned and kicked the store’s door while making additional threats, including, “One way or another, I’m getting to you.”

Police later located Orange outside a nearby bar. He acknowledged visiting the record shop earlier to sell records and had a lighter with him when officers found him.

Orange was arraigned on attempted arson, two burglary counts, coercion and menacing. A judge ordered him held without bail pending a preventive detention hearing.

Afterward, the store owner wrote on social media about his frustration with the broader mental health crisis, saying he felt he had exhausted his options for dealing with the problem.

By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

Three LNG carriers loaded from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in the Persian Gulf have transferred their cargoes onto other vessels outside the Strait of Hormuz in the past month, a move that’s highly unusual for LNG cargoes but one that could raise the crippled LNG shipments from the region.

LNG traffic at the Strait of Hormuz nevertheless remains at a standstill, even though oil flows are estimated to have rebounded in recent weeks.

However, unlike crude oil, it’s much more difficult to shuttle-ship LNG through Hormuz and then reload it via a ship-to-ship (STS) transfer as Persian Gulf producers, including Qatar, have been doing in recent months to ship oil to customers.

The UAE and Qatar appear to have done this with three LNG cargoes in August, Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing vessel-tracking data from Vortexa and Kpler.

The three LNG carriers in question include Greek-owned GasLog Shanghai, which was involved in an “incident” in the Strait of Hormuz at the end of July, and transferred its cargo onto GasLog Savannah offshore Oman outside the Strait in late August.

Qatar-owned Al Rekayyat, hit by a projectile near the Strait of Hormuz in early July, also conducted an STS transfer with Qatar-owned tanker Tembek in mid-August, according to the data compiled by Reuters.

The cargo on the Tembek was delivered to India on August 31.

ADNOC’s Mraweh LNG carrier also made an STS onto LNG Enugu outside the Strait offshore Oman in the middle of August, and is en route to deliver the cargo to Japan, according to the data.

The lack of meaningful recovery of LNG flows from the Persian Gulf and Qatar’s extended force majeure on deliveries combined with the U.S.-Iran re-escalation to hike Asia’s spot LNG prices to a five-month high and Europe’s benchmark natural gas prices to a three-and-a-half-year high this week.

Chinese President Xi Jinping in a rare trip to the Cairo told his Egyptian counterpart on Wednesday that “external interference” in the Middle East should be opposed, Chinese state media reported.

Talks in the Egyptian capital between Xi and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi were a first in a decade. Interestingly, Xi at one point pledged Beijing was willing to help protect maritime shipping – though it’s anything but clear what specifics would look like, or what bodies of water he had in mind.

“China stands ready to work with countries in the region to safeguard the security of international shipping lanes, advance development cooperation… and eliminate the breeding grounds for conflict,” Xi said as quoted in Xinhua.

Ironically the ‘offer’ comes months after President Trump urged international powers to do just that, but which was met by resounding silence, even among European leaders. Naturally they don’t want to get bogged down in yet another US foreign adventure, especially when there’s been lack of strategy coupled with repeat contradictions along the way.

As for his remarks about non-interference, Xi clearly had in mind the still-raging US-Iran war, which has turned into a bit of a quagmire for the US, having hit the six-month mark just this week:

“We must uphold the principle that the people of the Middle East are the masters of their own affairs, oppose external interference [and] support regional countries in strengthening dialogue on peace and security.”

The other irony on display is that Egypt’s is essentially a military government which is bought and paid for by the United States to the tune of around $2 billion or more in bilateral foreign assistance each year. This goes back to the historic peace with Israel, and the Egyptian ‘deep state’ has been closely cooperative with US intelligence ever since.

Along with talk of how to advance diplomacy related to the Iran war, the two sides signed a significant Suez Canal investment deal:

The talks covered the six-month US-Iran conflict, with both presidents urging “diplomatic solutions” to reach a “comprehensive agreement to end the war”, according to a statement from Sisi’s spokesperson.

Sisi’s office also said the two BRICS members signed an agreement to launch the third phase of the Egyptian-Chinese industrial zone at the Suez Canal, which officials say already hosts 200 companies and investments worth around $4 billion.

The new investments – for which Egypt has not announced a figure – give Beijing even greater influence in the canal zone, a critical artery of global trade, as conflict in the region chokes other conduits.

Regarding the White House’s Economic D-Day sanctions on Iran, Beijing last month rejected cooperation with the policy meant to strangle the Islamic Republic.

Egypt stays committed to ‘One China’…

Sisi’s statements are neither a personal opinion nor a passing remark; rather, they represent the official and steadfast stance of the Egyptian state for decades.

​Egypt recognized the People’s Republic of China in 1956, voted in favor of United Nations General Assembly… https://t.co/Nsp8F2dCWv

— khaled mahmoued (@khaledmahmoued1) September 2, 2026

China has been pushing back against Trump administration pressure to be part of the “toughest sanctions in history” which has marked a new phase of conflict focused on extended economic warfare, as a military solution has proven increasingly unrealistic and unlikely.

“Regarding the Iran issue, sanctions and pressure do not help resolve the problem,” Reuters quoted a representative of the Chinese Embassy in Washington as saying in late August. The White House’s recent plan hinges on on external countries imposing extreme isolation on the Islamic Republic.

Authored by Kimberly Hayek via The Epoch Times,

Federal immigration officers arrested 121 illegal immigrants on Aug. 30 at a Memphis nightclub during a targeted multiagency enforcement action, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said.

New Orleans field office for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) led Operation Corral Light at the El Corralon nightclub, in which officers executed federal and state warrants, DHS said in a statement on Sept. 1.

The DHS said that those taken into custody included people with criminal histories involving larceny, drug possession, domestic violence, driving while intoxicated, assault, child endangerment, and prostitution.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin tied the arrests to broader efforts to fight crime in the Tennessee city.

“Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, crime in the city of Memphis has plummeted. A big part of that success comes from arresting and deporting illegal aliens in the city,” Mullin said.

“Through Operation Corral Light, ICE arrested more than 120 illegal aliens in a single day, including child abusers, drug traffickers, and violent assailants.”

Scott Ladwig, acting field office director for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations in New Orleans, described the effort as a priority.

“This criminal enforcement operation to arrest illegal aliens and eliminate drug activity in our community is part of the highest priorities of this administration,” Ladwig said.

“Our officers remain committed to enforcing the law professionally, protecting the public, and upholding the trust placed in us by the American people.”

Among those arrested were Ricardo N. Rodriguez Arteaga, a Honduran national with a conviction for larceny and an arrest for commercial sex involving homosexual prostitution. Sergio Vieyra Torres, from Mexico, faced prior arrests for child endangerment and driving under the influence of liquor. Maryari Pamela Lopez Urivina, also from Honduras, had an arrest for aggravated assault. Jeronima Giron Cisneros, another Honduran, was arrested for domestic violence. Miguel Galeas Rodriguez, from Honduras, had a conviction for cocaine possession.

The operation fits into ongoing federal work in Memphis, where the Memphis Safe Task Force, established after a presidential memorandum in September 2025, has tackled the city’s high violent crime rates.

FBI data for 2024 showed Memphis with the highest per-capita violent crime rate among all major U.S. cities. The task force had reached 10,000 arrests by June, with more than 1,700 illegal firearms recovered. The group’s responsibilities include immigration enforcement alongside other public-safety measures.

The city had a violent crime rate roughly six times the national average in 2024.

A potentially dangerous laboratory incident at MIT triggered a hazmat response last week after a graduate student told medical personnel he believed he had created dimethylmercury, a highly toxic mercury compound, according to the NY Post.

The student, who has not been publicly identified, went to a local emergency room and reported the possible synthesis. That claim was serious enough to prompt MIT to close Building 18, part of its chemistry complex, while emergency crews and university officials assessed the situation.

MIT later said the student was not authorized to work with dimethylmercury and that the substance was unrelated to his approved research.

As a precaution, the university also took steps outside the laboratory. Shared spaces in the student’s residence hall were professionally cleaned, while the student’s own room was sealed during the investigation.

The NY Post writes that by Saturday, however, the situation had become less clear. MIT said new information had raised doubts about whether dimethylmercury had actually been produced. The university also said the student’s first blood test showed no evidence of mercury exposure, although the student remained under medical observation.

Testing and investigative work continued through the weekend, with Building 18 remaining closed through Sunday.

Dimethylmercury is considered an exceptionally hazardous substance because even a very small exposure can be deadly. The chemical is perhaps best known for the 1997 death of Dartmouth chemistry professor Karen Wetterhahn, who was exposed when a tiny amount reached her hand despite the gloves she was wearing.

The compound has also surfaced in at least one criminal case. It was reportedly used in the 2012 killing of a German labor union official.

MIT has not yet said definitively whether the student succeeded in making the chemical, leaving the central question of the incident unresolved even after the emergency response and cleanup.

Authored by Kimberly Hayek via The Epoch Times,

The Trump administration will launch Foundry School on Thursday, a national training program meant to prepare entrepreneurs, engineers, technicians, and industrial leaders for a rebuilding of U.S. manufacturing.

Vice President JD Vance is set to headline the event, according to a State Department press release. Foundry School falls under Pax Silica, the department’s multilateral effort to lock down trusted supply chains for technologies expected to shape the coming decades.

Officials say President Donald Trump’s reindustrialization push has already drawn trillions of dollars in investment to American soil. Foundry School’s focus will be to convert that capital into actual employment.

American manufacturers will need an estimated 3.8 million skilled workers by 2033 across semiconductors, defense, energy, and related fields, according to the press release. The program is designed to put American workers first by giving them the skills to bring those jobs home and build careers in sectors tied to economic security.

The launch starts at 8:20 a.m. at the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace in Washington. Senior administration officials, university leaders, and industry executives are scheduled to speak.

Foundry School was first announced as a Pax Silica project by Under Secretary Jacob Helberg at the Pax Summit on June 25. It is structured as a workforce partnership with Stanford University, which developed the core advanced manufacturing curriculum for American students.

Keystone lectures will come from seven other universities that collaborated with Stanford. They are Arizona State University, Georgia Tech, Ohio State, Penn State, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Kansas, and Vanderbilt.

Across the eight campuses, the program will run 17 sessions. Founders and CEOs from advanced manufacturing firms will teach. Those leaders will come from the United States and from Pax Silica partner countries such as South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and India.

The sessions are meant to cover everything required to build and run a top-tier manufacturing operation. Officials describe it as a single course aimed at making sure the American workforce shares in the industrial expansion.

“The entire Trump economic agenda is about making it easier to do business in America, to create jobs in America, to hire American workers, and to build your factories here in America, not in China, or any other country,” Trump said in April 2025.

Studies have shown a skills shortage in the United States. A 2024 Deloitte study estimated 3.8 million new manufacturing positions would open by 2033, with only about half likely to be filled without major training efforts.

The jobs of the future in the modern manufacturing sector are expected to include highly technical and specialized roles, such as in robotics, artificial intelligence, and 3D printing. Experts say that the young generation of workers lack the skills to perform these tasks.