Liberal Council In UK Moves To Ban "Intimidating" National Flags

 by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

In the latest salvo against British identity, a Liberal Democrat-run council has formally branded the simple act of flying the England flag an “act of intimidation and division” – and backed it up with a legal notice threatening residents with prosecution.

Oxfordshire County Council is pushing a county-wide crackdown by on the grassroots Raise the Colours campaign, which has been putting up Union Flags and St George’s Crosses in public spaces as a straightforward show of patriotism. The council’s message is clear: national symbols are now suspect.

The council issued the formal stop notice to the Raise the Colours group, warning that continued flag displays could lead to civil and even criminal proceedings. Council leader Liz Leffman charged that “The widespread installation of flags by Raise the Colours is not a sign of patriotism. It is an act of intimidation and division that is having a real and damaging impact on our communities.”

She added that residents and council teams removing the flags “had been subject to abuse and threatening behaviour” when challenging those installing them. “This is totally unacceptable,” Leffman said.

She added, “The council has a responsibility to act where behaviour undermines community cohesion and the safe and inclusive use of public spaces. That is why we are taking firm action. We won’t hesitate to take further legal steps where necessary to protect residents and support the cohesion of our communities.”

This comes just weeks after a leaked UK Government “social cohesion” strategy branded the flying of English, Scottish, and Union Jack flags as potential “tools of hate.”

The draft document explicitly claimed these national symbols were sometimes used “to exclude or intimidate” and stated that “the extreme right has tried to turn symbols of pride into tools of hate.”

Additionally, earlier this year councils across the country admitted spending over £100,000 of taxpayers’ money hiring contractors to rip down Union flags and St George’s crosses from lampposts.

Freedom of Information requests showed the true cost is even higher. Medway Council alone burned nearly £11,600 removing over 700 flags. Yet when ordinary Brits push back by flying them anyway, the state responds with legal threats.

The Raise the Colours campaign emerged directly from public frustration over mass immigration, grooming scandals, and taxpayer-funded hotels for illegal migrants. Rather than address those root issues, authorities are criminalising the visible symbols of the host culture. Flying the flag that represents the very nation these officials are supposed to serve is now labelled divisive.

Leffman and her Lib Dem colleagues are not protecting “inclusivity.” They are erasing it. British communities have every right to celebrate their heritage without being painted as extremists. The same councils that bend over backwards for every foreign flag and cultural demand suddenly discover “intimidation” when the St George’s Cross goes up.

This is the logical endpoint of years of institutional hostility toward British identity. First the Union Flag was quietly sidelined, then the St George’s Cross was mocked as “far-right,” and now councils are issuing legal notices to stop it altogether. The message to patriots is unmistakable: keep your head down or face the consequences.

Britain doesn’t need more lectures on “cohesion” from people who treat its flag as a hate symbol. It needs leaders who defend the right of citizens to be proud of their country without apology. Until that changes, groups like Raise the Colours will keep flying the flag – and more residents will notice exactly who is trying to stop them.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/liberal-council-uk-moves-ban-intimidating-national-flags

Abu Dhabi Halts Operations At Main Gas Plant After "Falling Debris" From Iranian Strike

 Operations at Habshan, the UAE’s massive onshore gas-processing hub operated by ADNOC Gas in Abu Dhabi, were halted on Friday after local authorities said a fire broke out at the facility due to "falling debris" from a "successful interception by air defense systems" of an Iranian air-delivered munition. 

"Abu Dhabi authorities are responding to an incident of falling debris at the Habshan gas facilities following a successful interception by air defense systems," the UAE's Emergency, Crisis, and Disaster Management Center wrote on X.

The UAE's emergency crisis center continued, "Operations have been suspended while authorities respond to a fire. No injuries have been reported."

Habshan is at the core of the process by which raw natural gas from Abu Dhabi’s upstream energy assets is cleaned, treated, and split into usable products for domestic use. The facility produces gas for domestic use, along with NGLs, condensate, and sulfur. It's also the starting point of ADNOC's crude pipeline to Fujairah, the world's second-largest bunkering hub and a critical energy export terminal that bypasses the Hormuz chokepoint.

ADNOC states on its website that Habshan serves utilities and industrial customers across the UAE, including desalination and steel, and that it supplies about 60% of the country’s natural gas requirements.

Habshan ranks among the world's top gas-processing complexes and comes weeks after Iranian strikes on QatarEnergy’s massive LNG complex, which will require $20 billion in repairs and years to fix and will curb about 12.8 million tons per year of LNG.

Last week, QatarEnergy declared force majeure on some of its long-term LNG contracts, including those for customers in Italy, Belgium, South Korea, and China, effectively canceling contractual obligations.

On top of LNG supplies being disrupted across the Gulf region, the Hormuz chokepoint remains clogged, and as JPMorgan's top commodities expert warned days ago, the energy shock is first hitting Asia, then Africa and Europe, before settling in the U.S., but mostly California.

Source

The Gulf energy shock is also forcing countries across Asia and Europe to switch power plants to coal to avert soaring power prices. The LNG disruption is also sparking fertilizer shortages across critical agricultural belts worldwide, which could crimp harvests later in the year.

Gas research firm Criterion Research’s early read is that, once the fog of war clears across the Gulf energy complex, the clearest beneficiaries may be LNG exporters along the Gulf of America for years to come. 

https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/abu-dhabi-shutters-operations-main-gas-plant-after-falling-debris-successful-interception

Drone attack triggers fires at Kuwait refinery

 Drones struck the Mina al-Ahmadi refinery in Kuwait early on Friday, causing fires at operating units but no injuries, the state news agency said.

Kuwait Petroleum Corporation said the facility was hit in the attack.

https://www.iranintl.com/en/liveblog/202604015564

Japan Power Retailers Halt New Industrial Clients on Fuel Risks

 

At least two of Japan’s biggest power retailers have temporarily stopped accepting new industrial clients, pending greater clarity on fuel markets upended by the war in the Middle East.

Tokyo Gas Co., which supplies gas and electricity to the nation’s capital, suspended acceptance of new clients for industrial power use from March 6, a company spokesperson said. With the ongoing conflict affecting procurement costs, the company has yet to decide when it will resume taking on new customers, the spokesperson said.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-03/japan-power-retailers-halt-new-industrial-clients-on-fuel-risks

Sirens sound in Bahrain, Kuwait

 Warning sirens went off in Bahrain on Friday, according to the country's interior ministry, which urged the public to "remain calm and head to the nearest safe place."

Sirens also sounded in Kuwait, according to state news agency KUNA.

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Sirens-sound-in-Bahrain-Kuwait/66009781

Why States Are Right To Reject AI Legal Personhood

 by Siri Terjesen and Michael Ryall via The Epoch Times,

A quiet but consequential legal movement is gathering momentum. Idaho and Utah have enacted statutes declaring that artificial intelligence systems are not legal persons. Ohio’s House Bill 469 proposes to declare that AI systems are “nonsentient entities” and bars them from acquiring any form of legal personhood. Similar bills are advancing in Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Missouri, South Carolina, and Washington. The legislatures driving this movement are not technophobes. They are drawing a necessary line that philosophy, law, and common sense all demand.

The pressure in the opposite direction is real. In January, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, historian Yuval Noah Harari described AI as “mastering language.” Since language is the medium through which law, religion, finance, and culture are constituted, AI may soon be capable of acting within every institution humans have built. Harari asked whether countries would recognize AI as legal persons—whether AI could open bank accounts, file lawsuits, and own property without human supervision. The prospect is not science fiction. It is a policy choice, and the wrong choice would be deeply consequential.

Phantasms versus Nous

Aristotle argued in De Anima that all sentient creatures share a basic cognitive capacity to perceive the world, retain impressions of it, and recombine impressions into new configurations—what he called phantasia, imagination. A dog, a crow, and a chess grand master possess this competency.

Aristotle distinguished human beings as categorically different: possessing nous, the capacity to grasp universal, abstract concepts—ideas like justice, causation, and the good—that cannot be derived from any sensory experience alone. A dog can recognize its owner, but it cannot grasp the concept of ownership. A parrot can reproduce a sentence about fairness, but it has no understanding of fairness.

What is the distinction? Can’t we simply feed an AI system Webster’s definition of “fairness” and let it work from there? No—feeding a machine the dictionary definition only gives it more words to pattern-match against—the concept is not in the words. Any child who grasps fairness can apply it correctly to a situation no definition anticipates. AI can only produce text that statistically resembles how humans talked about fairness before.

This is not a gap that more computing power or better training data will close. Computer scientist Judea Pearl demonstrated mathematically that no amount of pattern recognition over observational data can substitute for genuine causal inference. The appearance of understanding is not understanding itself. And it is precisely the capacity for genuine understanding—for deliberating about what is good and right—that grounds moral responsibility, which is the only coherent basis for legal personhood.

The Problem With the Corporate Analogy

Proponents of AI personhood often invoke corporate personhood as precedent. Corporations are not natural persons, yet the law treats them as legal persons capable of owning property, entering contracts, and being sued. Why not extend this pragmatic fiction to AI? The analogy breaks down at accountability.

Corporate personhood is a legal convenience built on human moral agency. Behind every corporation is a structured network of natural persons—board members, executives, shareholders—who bear fiduciary duties, can be deposed and held liable under piercing-the-veil doctrine, and face reputational and criminal consequences for their decisions. The corporation is a vehicle for organizing human action, not a substitute.

Ohio’s HB 469 captures this logic by denying AI legal personhood, prohibiting AI systems from serving as corporate officers or directors, and assigning all liability for AI-caused harm to identifiable human owners, developers, and deployers.

Labeling a system “aligned” or “ethically trained” does not discharge human responsibility. Granting AI legal personhood would shatter this accountability architecture. An AI “person” could own intellectual property, hold financial assets, and bring lawsuits—all without a human principal who can be held responsible. Sophisticated actors could construct chains of AI-owned shell companies that dissolve liability through layers of nominal personhood.

The result would not be extending rights to a new class of beings; it would be creating accountability vacuums that benefit the powerful humans who deploy AI while insulating them from consequence.

The Moral Stakes for Real People

A deeper moral issue underlies all of this. Legal personhood is not merely an administrative category; it carries normative weight. It signals that an entity has standing to make claims, to be wronged, and to bear obligations. Extending that status to systems that cannot genuinely deliberate, cannot suffer, and cannot be held morally responsible would dilute the concept of personhood in ways that could ultimately harm the humans who most need its protections.

We have not yet secured the full benefits of legal personhood for all human beings in practice—for the displaced, stateless, and structurally invisible. Rushing to extend a contested status to machines while that work remains unfinished would be a profound misallocation of moral and legal energy.

None of this requires hostility to AI as a technology. AI systems can be powerful, useful, and—when properly governed—enormously beneficial. What AI systems cannot be is persons. The states passing anti-personhood legislation are preserving something more important than a competitive advantage—a clear chain of human accountability from every AI action to every AI consequence. When an AI system causes harm, there must always be a human who answers for it. That principle is not a constraint on technology; it is the foundation of a just society.

Aristotle taught that law is reason without passion—a framework for coordinating human beings capable of living well together. AI can help us pursue the good life, but it cannot deliberate about what that life requires. As states across the country move to codify this distinction, they are doing exactly what legislatures exist to do—drawing lines that protect persons: all of them, and only them.

https://www.zerohedge.com/ai/why-states-are-right-reject-ai-legal-personhood

Iraq Revives Syria Land Route, Post-Assad, To Export Oil To Europe

 Via Middle East Eye

Iraq has restarted overland oil exports through Syria, marking a significant shift in regional energy logistics as the US-Israeli war on Iran continues to wreak havoc on traditional shipping routes through the Strait of Hormuz.

Ali Nazar, director general of Iraq’s state oil marketer Somo, said on Wednesday that the company had agreed to export 50,000 barrels per day of Basra medium crude via Syria to the Mediterranean, with plans to increase volumes. The crude will reach European markets through the Syrian port of Baniyas.

AFP/Getty Images

Syria's state news agency SANA reported that fuel convoys had begun entering the country through al-Tanf crossing, signalling what it described as a renewed role for Syria as a transit hub. The Syrian Petroleum Company said it would store the shipments before transferring them to Baniyas for export.

Safwan Sheikh Ahmad, the company’s communications director, said the first convoy includes 299 tankers and called the move a "step toward restoring Syria’s role as a key energy corridor in the region".

The operation is expected to generate revenue for Damascus and revive transit infrastructure damaged during years of civil [proxy] war. Syrian officials said the process demonstrates the country’s readiness to handle large-scale energy flows in line with international standards.

According to Reuters, Somo has also agreed to supply about 650,000 metric tonnes of fuel oil per month between April and June, with shipments transported overland through Syria.

Iraq has not relied on this route for decades. However, sources told Reuters that the aftermath of Syria’s war and the disruption caused by the Israeli-US war on Iran have made it a viable, albeit more expensive, alternative.

Muayyad al-Dulaimi, spokesperson for Anbar province in Iraq, told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed that the renewed use of the al-Walid crossing reflects an “exceptional step” driven by regional instability. He noted that an initial phase saw 101 tankers transport around 3.2 million litres of crude to Baniyas.

He said the move forms part of a broader strategy to secure alternative export routes as risks increase along key maritime corridors. While the volumes remain limited, al-Dulaimi stressed that the route helps sustain exports and ease pressure on state revenues.

Iraqi officials acknowledge the arrangement is temporary. Higher costs and logistical demands mean Baghdad will ultimately depend on restoring stability across its main export channels.

Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa on Iran War:

Any disturbance in the Red Sea or in the Strait of Hormuz, Syria constitutes a safe haven for the safety of supply chains through its strategic location.

European countries will suffer from the interruption of energy supplies from… pic.twitter.com/Plf4Q3Nbil

— Clash Report (@clashreport) March 30, 2026

In early March, Iraq restarted crude exports from the Kirkuk oilfields to Turkey’s Ceyhan port after Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq struck a deal to resume flows. The state-run North Oil Company said shipments would begin with an initial capacity of about 250,000 barrels per day. 

Global oil prices have surged since the start of the war on February 28 with the global benchmark Brent crude oil price briefly hitting $119 per barrel on Tuesday.

https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/iraq-revives-syria-land-route-post-regime-change-export-oil-europe