The United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) said it interdicted a vessel "operating as a floating refueling station in support of illicit at-sea drug trafficking operations", sinking the ship after escorting and removing those on it to Ecuador.
The intelligence confirmed the vessel was "previously identified and targeted under Department of the Treasury sanctions ... operating in support of the Los Choneros violent narco-terrorist organization."
"Today's operation is a stark example of the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition's power to dismantle the sophisticated, clandestine narco-terrorist tactics and capabilities that have enabled the trafficking of dangerous drugs destined for American communities," General Francis L. Donovan added.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said in a Friday interview with state television that Iran’s exports and imports had fallen by between 25% and 35%, with imports declining more sharply than exports.
“Then some people say sanctions have no effect at all,” Pezeshkian said. “I really don’t know what to say to these people.”
“Reason is a good thing,” he added, saying claims that sanctions had no impact were inconsistent with the trade figures.
The US government is exploring an unusual legal route for dealing with Iranian oil and ships captured as part of its blockade: bringing back a wartime maritime system that has barely been used for generations, according toBloomberg.
The Justice Department, working with the Pentagon, is preparing to use prize law, which historically allowed courts to decide whether vessels and cargo captured during armed conflict could legally become property of the United States. The mechanism was once commonplace in naval warfare but largely disappeared from American practice after the 19th century and has been dormant since World War II.
The appeal for the administration is largely practical. At present, the government generally relies on civil forfeiture to take ownership of vessels accused of sanctions violations or other offenses. Those cases can become complicated and slow, particularly when shipping companies, creditors, terrorism victims or other parties assert competing rights to the ship or its cargo. A prize proceeding could potentially narrow those disputes and allow captured oil to be sold more quickly, with the proceeds going to the US Treasury.
Bloomberg writes that Houston is being considered as a central venue for these cases. The Southern District of Texas has jurisdiction over a major port and sits alongside the country’s largest concentration of petrochemical infrastructure, giving it the capacity to receive and store substantial quantities of crude. US Attorney Aaron Reitz, whose office is working with DOJ officials in Washington, said the department is “now reviving” prize courts, describing the concept as an “ancient body of maritime law.”
The effort comes as Washington looks for additional ways to put economic pressure on Iran. US forces have already intercepted Iranian-owned or Iran-linked vessels since the blockade was imposed in April. Using prize law could turn those captures into a more direct financial tool: ships and oil deemed lawful prizes could be liquidated, potentially generating revenue while depriving Iran of valuable exports.
Supporters also see a strategic purpose beyond the money. Reviving the system would reinforce the message that the US considers the blockade a serious wartime measure rather than simply another sanctions regime. It could also make it more difficult for neutral commercial vessels to continue transporting goods that Washington believes support Iran.
But there is considerable uncertainty over how a centuries-old framework would operate under modern international law. “This really is a historical area of law that is not tested in modern times,” maritime attorney Allison Luzwick said. Courts could be asked to determine whether the current conflict provides sufficient legal grounds for invoking prize authority at all, particularly given questions surrounding congressional authorization for the hostilities.
The practical challenges are significant as well. Federal judges, prosecutors and the Navy have virtually no contemporary experience administering prize cases, meaning procedures would effectively have to be rebuilt for modern shipping and warfare. Shipowners and other parties with financial claims are also expected to contest seizures.
There are broader geopolitical risks. Critics argue that normalizing prize law could create a precedent that Washington may later regret. A rival power such as China, for example, could point to US practice when attempting to seize American or neutral merchant vessels during a future conflict.
The proposal therefore offers Washington a potentially faster way to convert captured Iranian oil into government revenue and tighten economic pressure on Tehran, but it would do so by reopening an area of wartime law that has gone largely untouched for more than a century.
Brazilian socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and right-wing Senator Flávio Bolsonaro are virtually tied as August comes to a close, according to UBS analysts citing new polling data, turning October's presidential election into a potential coin toss. A Bolsonaro victory would accelerate the eradication of left-wing rule across South America as the continent undergoes a once-in-a-generation rightward political realignment. That shift may also offer an early signal of Europe's upcoming 18-month election cycle, in which right-wing parties and candidates are gaining momentum across several major countries.
Alexandre de Ázara, a managing director and chief economist for Brazil at UBS, told clients on Friday that "the gap is closing" in Brazil's presidential race as Bolsonaro pulls within striking distance of President Lula.
UBS's latest polling aggregator shows Lula taking 44% of valid first-round votes, down one percentage point from Monday's update. Bolsonaro rose one point to 38%, while other candidates remained at 18%.
First round aggregator and polls (% of valid votes for Lula)
First round aggregator and polls (% of valid votes for Flávio)
The runoff numbers are even tighter, according to Ázara. Lula now leads Bolsonaro by just 50.6% to 49.4%, cutting the incumbent's advantage to 1.2 percentage points from 2.8 points at the start of the week.
Ázara uses a mixture of polling data from Datafolha, Veritá, Nexus, Gerp, Indexa and PoderData. He said new polling data from Vox, Nexus, Real Time Big Data, and Atlas are expected over the next few days.
Prediction markets appear considerably more confident in Lula than the polls.
Polymarket gives the president a 62% chance of winning...
...compared with 35% for Bolsonaro. Kalshi places the contest at 61% versus 39%.
Brazilian voters face a stark ideological choice in October between the incumbent socialist Lula and right-wing Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro has portrayed the economy as trapped by high spending, high interest rates, and rising debt.
Barclays estimates that the next administration would need a fiscal adjustment of at least 2.5% of gross domestic product, or about 350 billion reais, to stabilize the debt burden by 2031.
TS Lombard expects Lula to pursue limited spending reforms following the election but projects that debt would still peak at 94.7% of GDP in 2034. Under Bolsonaro, the analysts model a faster adjustment and a proposed debt-linked spending rule, but debt would still reach 90% in 2032.
Comments from Bank of America's Latam Equity Quant:
Brasilia in election mode: investors on standby waiting to see how the elections play out. Uncertainty on the electoral outcome remains high as polls have been showing more convergence in President Lula's and Flavio Bolsonaro's voting intentions.
ING Analysts:
BRL: Presidential polling in play
It has been a positive environment for the carry trade, but what has also been helping the Brazilian real this week has been an opinion poll showing that President Lula's lead over Flavio Bolsonaro has dropped to just one percentage point. Bolsonaro is running on a ticket of fiscal consolidation and hoping to emulate the victory of Colombia's Abelardo de la Espriella this year, which has been greeted warmly by local asset markets.
The first round of the Brazilian presidential election takes place on 4 October. Expect USD/BRL to be bounced around by polling results before then. But with 12% implied yields through the forwards and the chance of a regime change, we suspect the real can continue to comfortably outperform the steep forward curve.
The election may determine whether Brazil moves further left or right politically. Across the continent, the latest country to shift right was Colombia. Many others have followed:
More broadly, voters in the West are rejecting left-wing regimes, as failed progressive experiments, open borders, and nation-killing socialist policies have been nothing but devastating.
China has removed two top generals from its highest military command body and expelled two other senior commanders from a Communist Party-controlled legislature, as turbulence continues within the upper echelon of the country's armed forces.
Once China's No. 1 general, Zhang Youxia, has been removed from the national Central Military Commission (CMC), according to a brief statement issued by the National People's Congress Standing Committee via state media Xinhua on Aug. 28.
The statement didn't offer any reason for the swift dismissal of Zhang, who had served as vice chair of the national CMC since 2018.
Zhang, also a member of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP's) ruling Politburo, was abruptly placed under investigation in January, along with another senior commander, Liu Zhenli. Both men were accused of serious violations of discipline and laws, a phrase that generally refers to corruption or disloyalty.
Liu was also stripped of his title as a member of the national CMC, according to Xinhua.
Technically, China has two separate CMCs-one affiliated with the state and the other within the CCP-sharing the same personnel and leadership. In practice, however, the Party's CMC holds the real power. The two commanders haven't been formally, or at least publicly, expelled from the Party's military body.
The latest announcement effectively reduced the CMC from six members to one, plus Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the top.
China's armed forces have been embroiled in an unprecedented purge that has almost vacated the leadership of every branch of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), raising questions about the military's combat readiness.
A February report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that more than 100 senior military commanders have likely been purged since 2022.
Unlike the military chiefs previously targeted, Zhang and Liu are among the few active-duty generals in the country who have battlefield experience. Zhang served in China's brief war with Vietnam in 1979, while Liu took part in border skirmishes with Vietnam in the 1980s.
Because these officers were members of the legislature, they previously had legal protection against arrest or prosecution. By removing them from those positions, that protection was stripped away, opening them up to criminal prosecution.
According to China insiders who previously spoke to The Epoch Times, Beijing has already decided to charge Zhang, likely with corruption-related allegations, to shift attention away from the power struggle within the Party.
In addition to Zhang and Liu, the NPC on Aug. 28 revoked the membership of Zhong Shaojun, a long-time aide to Xi, according to Xinhua.
Zhong became Xi's secretary in the early 2000s when Xi was transferred to a position in Zhejiang, China's top economic powerhouse on the eastern coast. Since then, Zhong followed Xi into roles in Shanghai and, later, the central leadership in Beijing.
After Xi took power as the Party leader in late 2012, Zhong was appointed to the CMC chairman's office, working directly under Xi, and elevated to the military rank of senior colonel.
Also expelled from the NPC on the same day was Ju Qiansheng, commander of the PLA Strategic Support Force.
Xinhua did not provide reasons for their departure.
The purge in the defense establishment shows no signs of abating. In an Aug. 24 notice, China's military said it's seeking information from the public on potential procurement violations in the Rocket Forces, a secretive PLA unit that commands the country's conventional and nuclear missiles.
This notice echoed a 2023 announcement by the PLA's Equipment Development Department that encouraged citizens to report potential corruption and misconduct related to hardware procurement going back to October 2017. Since then, China has expelled two defense ministers and all four generals who had commanded the Rocket Forces.
The Department of Health and Human Services commissioned a study that found a measurable link between accepting transgender ideology and supporting left-wing political violence.
Researchers at Rutgers University, the Manhattan Institute and the Network Contagion Research Institute produced the report, called "Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?" which was obtained by the New York Post ahead of its release.
The team surveyed 1,208 American adults on the importance of affirming gender identity, on perceived threats to transgender people from groups the survey lists as "white supremacists, men, the Supreme Court, etc.," and on support for anti-democratic behaviors.
To gauge a respondent's degree of support for gender ideology, researchers built a metric they call the Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale (CGAS), drawn from what they describe as "consensus positions" of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, chosen because they "represent the official scientific and clinical establishment on care for individuals who identify as transgender."
Researchers then asked respondents about six potential targets of political violence. The report describes them as "killing Charlie Kirk, killing Donald Trump, killing Brian Thompson, arson of ICE buildings, damaging wealthy people's property, and violence against police."
Across preregistered analyses, CGAS and related gender ideological-belief measures were strongly associated with left-wing authoritarianism (LWA), with Spearman correlations ranging from ρ = 0.44 to ρ = 0.59. CGAS also significantly predicted LWA, accounting for 31.5% of its variance. In ordinal regressions predicting CGAS, political identity was the strongest predictor, but LWA remained an independent predictor after controlling for political identity and age. LWA and CGAS were also positively associated with justification of political violence across six targets: killing Charlie Kirk, killing Donald Trump, killing Brian Thompson, arson of ICE buildings, damaging wealthy people's property, and violence against police. Both independently predicted all six violence outcomes after controlling for left-wing political identity.
These findings suggest that gender ideology is associated with LWA and willingness to justify political violence. Experimental research is needed to determine causality.
The report's conclusion reaches past correlation. Gender ideology, the authors write, "may function as an ideological accelerant, telling left-wing authoritarian psychology who the enemy is, why the situation is urgent, and - in those already disposed toward force - that violence is legitimate."
Researchers also examined what they term catastrophizing beliefs. The report assessed "the perceived likelihood that a genocide of individuals that identify as transgender is currently under way," alongside what it calls "associate extremist responses," including support for censoring and punishing people who reject transgender ideology or ignore Supreme Court rulings on gender issues. The authors treat the strength of that connection as unsettled. "We have good reasons to expect that LWA and CGAS will predict support for these sorts of anti-democratic beliefs, but those are empirical questions which will be answered in the analysis that are ongoing," they write.
Study researcher Colin Wright called the results among the most striking he has encountered. "One of our study's most interesting and perhaps shocking findings was that accepting gender ideology appeared to augment authoritarian attitudes on support for political violence," Wright told the Post. He offered one possible mechanism. "We believe this may result from gender ideology defining specific oppressed classes and their oppressors, and the promotion of extreme narratives of harm for those who refuse to affirm transgender identities both socially and medically," Wright said. He stopped short of calling that explanation settled. "That is only speculative at this point, but we are addressing this directly in a follow-up report," Wright said.
The rise of violence linked to transgender perpetrators or allies is hard to dismiss. Last year, Tyler Robinson allegedly shot Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk in the neck while he addressed a crowd at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. Robinson reportedly had a relationship with a transgender roommate. In 2022, Nicholas Roske, who identifies as a transgender woman, approached Justice Brett Kavanaugh's home armed, with the attempt to assassinate him.
Individuals who identified as transgender carried out separate school shootings in Minnesota and Tennessee in the years since. None of this proves causation, and the study's authors concede as much themselves, and a follow-up study is in the works.
"A second study is being designed to address some of the limitations of the study described herein," the authors explain in the conclusion. "This second study will take the causal direction issue head on by using an experimental design to test whether exposure to CGAS-consistent content produces the patterns predicted by the present theory. The cross-sectional correlations reported here constitute the discovery sample; the planned pre-registered experiment will constitute the confirmatory causal test."
Los Angeles City Council was pitched a truly bizarre solution to the city’s homelessness crisis: free “sexual relief clinics” for homeless people — paid for by taxpayers.
Los Angeles City Councilmember Traci Park blasted a recent proposal for the city to fund free “public sex huts” for the homeless.Instagram/@councilwomantracipark
The clip highlighted a bizarre moment during a recent City Council meeting when an unidentified public speaker suggested the city create private spaces where homeless people could have sex or masturbate away from public view.
“I would like to propose that Los Angeles consider a pilot program for free hygienic sexual relief clinics, primarily serving the homeless and unhoused,” said the unidentified speaker.
“This means equality. It means private sexual relief through masturbation or where appropriate and consensual with a partner.”
The speaker went on to say that “some research suggests that sexual release can help reduce stress” and “improve mood,” while pointing to thedifficult conditions faced by homelessAngelenos.
He suggested the program be “funded by public tax dollars and managed with professional oversight,” giving homeless people the “same comforts in privacy” as everyone else.
Park’s reaction — shown throughout the video — ranged from stunned to horrified.
Her clip included the bizarre moment during a recent city council meeting when an unidentified public speaker talked about the stress of being homeless and suggested the city offer places where homeless can have sex out of the public’s view.LA City Clerk
Then she delivered her verdict.
“No, we’re not doing public sex huts.”
The video ended with a clarification: “L.A. City Council is not considering public sex huts.”
Park represents a sprawling Westside district that includes Venice Beach, one of the city’s most visible battlegrounds in its homelessness crisis.
The speaker went on saying “some research suggests that sexual release can help reduce stress” and “improve mood,” as he pointed out the conditions of being homeless.David Buchan for Ca Post
The bizarre proposal comes as the council has taken heat over its approach to homelessness and public spaces.
The council recently voted 10-3 to lift anti-camping restrictions at more than a dozen parks and public spaces across Hollywood, Silver Lake and surrounding neighborhoods, making it easier for homeless people to stay in parks across District 13.
Theanti-camping ruleshad been in place for five years to prevent encampments from returning after being cleared by law enforcement.
Park and fellow councilmembers Imelda Padilla and Monica Rodriguez were the moderate voices who voted to keep the anti-camping restrictions in place.
Park and fellow council women Imelda Padilla and Monica Rodriguez, were the moderate voices, in the vote to keep the homeless anti-camping restrictions in place.David Buchan for Ca Post “We have spent billions on homeless housing and services, and our constituents have been incredibly generous,” Park said. “They have every right to expect something in return.”
The latest count from the LA Homeless Service Authority puts the number of people homeless in the city at 45,194.
