Friday, July 3, 2026
Oman joins UK and France on Hormuz
Outgoing United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer and France's President Emmanuel Macron issued a joint statement calling for secure passage through the Strait of Hormuz. The leaders confirmed that Oman will cooperate with the UK and France to protect its territorial waters.
They said the waterway is essential to the global economy and pledged to safeguard shipping lanes for all nations. "Restoring safe transit for ships of all nations through the Strait is a matter of global concern," the statement, published by Downing Street, read.
The statement also reaffirmed their commitment to "global security, freedom of navigation and international law," noting readiness to activate the Multinational Military Mission if required.
https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Oman-joins-UK-and-France-on-Hormuz/66631553
Trump claims Dems plan to add 'radical left' states
United States President Donald Trump claimed that Democrats plan to expand their influence by adding two new "Radical Left" states, electing four additional senators, enlarging the House of Representatives and creating a Supreme Court with 21 justices.
Trump shared his remarks in a Truth Social post, alongside a Politico report outlining a resolution from leaders of several House caucuses. The measure Trump reffered to calls for expanding the nation's highest court, setting term limits, adopting a code of ethics for justices and ending the 60-vote Senate filibuster.
In a Truth Social post, Trump warned Republicans that such changes would secure Democrats' control of elections and the Electoral College. "How much longer are you going to allow this to happen to you? They will TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER in their first hour, and I'll be sitting home with tears in my eyes saying, 'I TOLD YOU SO!'," Trump wrote.
https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Trump-claims-Dems-plan-to-add-'radical-left'-states/66631700
America Turns 250. At 125, It Looked Like The End...
by James Hickman via SchiffSovereign.com,
On the afternoon of September 6, 1901, President William McKinley stood in a receiving line at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, shaking hands with a crowd of well-wishers.
One of the people in the crowd was a young man named Leon Czolgosz… who was patiently waiting with a revolver wrapped in a handkerchief. When he reached the front, he fired twice into the president’s abdomen.
McKinley died eight days later, and, Czolgosz, an unemployed factory worker, went to the electric chair without a trace of remorse. He insisted it was his duty to strike down a symbol of oppression.
Czolgosz wasn’t a crazed madman, but rather a product of his time.
The America of 1901 was 125 years into its history - the exact midpoint between the Declaration of Independence and today.
And despite the US economy already being the largest in the world at that point, the year 1901 did not feel like a nation striding confidently into the American Century.
The US financial system lurched from panic to panic, and to a great many observers, the young republic looked less like a rising power and more like a country unraveling.
The rich versus poor divide was growing, and violent socialist movements spread. Political assassinations, terrorism, and bombings became a recurring feature of public life.
The political violence did not end with McKinley’s assassination, either. Followers of the Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani waged a years-long bombing campaign against judges, politicians, and businessmen.
It peaked at noon on September 16, 1920, when a horse-drawn wagon packed with explosives detonated in front of the headquarters of J.P. Morgan on Wall Street, killing thirty people and wounding hundreds more. The case was never solved.
Many of these anarcho-socialists were immigrants, which poured gasoline on the raging blaze of backlash against widespread immigration.
In 1907 alone, more than a million people passed through Ellis Island. Immigrants were arriving faster than anyone knew how to absorb them, and people were getting tired of it.
Congress passed legislation that imposed a literacy test on immigrants, then banned entire countries. At first, people from Asia and the Middle East were shut out. Subsequent legislation set strict quotas, slamming the door on the southern and eastern Europeans who were considered undesirable.
Yet the instability continued… as did the government’s push to consolidate power.
After the Panic of 1907 nearly brought down the financial system, Congress used the scare to establish the Federal Reserve in 1913. This was the first step toward money that could be printed at will.
Also in 1913, the Constitution was amended, giving Congress the power to tax income.
The income tax (16th Amendment) was sold to the American people as a tax on the very rich that would only affect the top 2% of US households. Idiotic socialists at the time believed the lie and supported the amendment; after all, the rich should pay their fair share.
Within decades, three quarters of Americans were paying income tax.
With a new central bank and tax power in place, Washington then raced to join World War I (despite being an ocean away), and borrowed on an unimaginable scale to do it.
Frankly it all looked pretty bleak.
And yet, while all the bad news and turmoil was ongoing, America was simultaneously producing miracles.
Henry Ford put the country on wheels with the Model T and the moving assembly line. Motion pictures went from novelty to industry. Radio turned from a tinkerer’s hobby into a machine that could broadcast to every home in the nation.
These were American breakthroughs that rewired the entire global economy and powered better times ahead.
Seventy-five years later, America’s 200th birthday looked little better. In 1976, the economy was mired in stagflation that “experts” had previously sworn was impossible.
Oil shocks had humiliated the country at the gas pump. American dominance looked spent in the wreckage of Vietnam, and the nation had watched President Richard Nixon resign in disgrace.
Terrorism was back. Plane hijackings were somewhat commonplace. Crime rampaged across the cities.
And yet what followed was the personal computer, the Internet, the longest peacetime expansion in the country’s history, and a comeback almost nobody standing in a gas line in 1976 would have believed.
Which brings us to the 250th birthday, today.
Political violence is back in American life. Immigration is once again a major issue. Fraud and corruption are rampant (and hardly anyone pays the price). And Washington’s finances are in worse shape than at any point in the country’s history, with the national debt larger than the entire economy.
Yet at the same time, American companies are building artificial intelligence, next-generation nuclear power, robotics, and biotech breakthroughs that could rewire the global economy even more than the assembly line and the Internet did. Chaos and invention have always lived side by side in the US, and they still do.
America was born out of revolution, and it has endured a civil war, two world wars, a depression, a decade of stagflation, and repeated financial panics.
Every one of those episodes brought years of real pain, but every time, the country that looked terminally ill came back stronger than ever.
There is an old saying in politics (usually credited to Winston Churchill, though apparently first quipped by an Israeli diplomat): Americans will always do the right thing… after exhausting all the alternatives.
Apocryphal or not, that is the pattern: the right thing comes eventually, but the pain comes first.
America is not just a country; it is an idea, and it may be the most extraordinary idea human beings have ever assembled. It stands on the shoulders of giants— Greek thought, Roman law, Judeo-Christian values, and free-market capitalism, fused with a conviction about individual liberty balanced by personal responsibility.
Betting against that idea has been the worst trade of the past 250 years.
To be clear, having a Plan B is not a bet against America either. The concept is not to hide in a bunker with canned food and guns because the end is near.
The point of a Plan B is to be honest about the road between here and the recovery: more inflation, higher taxes, and a stretch of instability, and to make sure you have the options available to come at it from a position of strength.
At 250 years, I truly believe the best days are still ahead. But there will be some rough ones in between.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/america-turns-250-125-it-looked-end
China-Linked Socialist NGO Derailed $23.6 Billion In Data Center Buildouts: Report
Our note on Thursday titled "World's Largest Data Center Project On Verge Of Collapse After Blackstone Unexpectedly Pulls Out" detailed Blackstone dialing back its presence from Northern Virginia's data-center alley, raising questions about whether the AI infrastructure buildout, colliding with local resistance movements, has begun to hit hard limits.
Just days after agreeing to sell stakes in three Virginia data centers to Digital Realty Trust for $3.5 billion, Blackstone's QTS Realty Trust is reportedly abandoning plans for its portion of the massive Prince William Digital Gateway project. The 2,100-acre campus was expected to include as many as 37 data-center buildings and require city-scale power supplies.
"For community organizers and residents that spent the last five years opposing the Digital Gateway, QTS's pullout will now validate a playbook that involved pressure campaigns on local politicians and legal attacks. It will also unleash even more powerful blowback nationwide against these unwanted developments," we noted.
That brings us to the composition of the local resistance. Multiple reports suggest data center opposition is not entirely organic.
In fact, one familiar player appears to be involved, a name our readers know well, and the U.S. government certainly recognizes because a China-based billionaire funds the socialist NGO network.
Y Combinator founder Garry Tan, also founder of Garry's List, a civic engagement organization, cited the Bitcoin Policy Institute's recent report on how a "coordinated foreign influence campaign against American AI — running through CCP state media, a Shanghai-based Marxist's nonprofit network, and foreign billionaire dark money that has funneled $2B+ into US advocacy infrastructure."
Garry's List noted, "AI doomerism isn't as organic as it looks."
That China-based Marxist's nonprofit network spreading across the US is supported by Neville Roy Singham, who has reportedly funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into left-wing nonprofits, media operations, and activist networks that seek to sow chaos and spread communism inside the US.
Earlier this week, U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton for the Southern District of New York, authorized by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, was authorized to examine whether Singham, NGOs he funded, or their leaders committed wire fraud, bank fraud, money laundering, or other financial crimes.
Given that federal investigators are circling the socialists in the Singham NGO network, Garry's List noted that Singham's Party for Socialism and Liberation has "run 21 campaigns across 14 states that delayed, scaled back, or blocked $23.6 billion in AI infrastructure investment."
None of this should be surprising because nearly one year ago we cited a new book titled China's Total War Strategy: Next-Generation Weapons of Mass Destruction - published by the CCP BioThreats Initiative and authored by Dr. Ryan Clarke, LJ Eads, Dr. Robert McCreight, and Dr. Xiaoxu Sean Lin - that outlines how the CCP has been pursuing an aggressive, multifaceted "total war" against the U.S. that leverages next-generation weapons, including synthetic narcotics (e.g., fentanyl and cannabinoids), bioweapons (e.g., Covid-19), psychological manipulation and influence (e.g., TikTok), and a broad arsenal of irregular warfare tools.
One of the irregular warfare tools we've sounded the alarm on is the use of nonprofits to sow chaos from within. It now appears that PSL and its socialist allies have moved beyond protesting U.S. foreign policy in Latin America and the Caribbean and anti-ICE riots, and have set their sights on data centers, just as the U.S. is locked in a compute race with China.
Even The New York Times has linked Singham to CCP-aligned propaganda networks.
The most dangerous surveillance company you’ve never heard of
by Wendy Strauch Mahoney
The Arizona-based Axon Enterprise, Inc. may not be a household name, but it is arguably the most powerful public safety technology company in America. Long known in law enforcement circles for its surveillance technologies, Axon is now aggressively building the technical architecture for A.I.-enabled, real-time, federally scalable policing. Yet the privacy and due process safeguards surrounding that architecture are likely far ker than the public is being led to believe.
Axon began as TASER International, building its brand around the TASER and police body cameras. In 2023, the company released what it called “the most advanced energy weapon ever,” the TASER 10. Today, Axon operates a vertically integrated technology platform for modern policing. Its architecture includes body cameras, cloud evidence storage, artificial intelligence, automated police reporting, real-time crime centers, live camera feeds, license plate readers, drones and counter-drone systems, and potentially facial recognition–enabled body camera research.
This stack is being sold to police and federal officials as modernization. But in the wrong hands, it could become something more dangerous: an unconstitutional surveillance grid resembling the systems already widely deployed in mainland China.
The Axon surveillance ecosystem
Axon describes Draft One, its A.I. report-writing system, as a product that can generate draft police narratives from body camera audio “in seconds.” Microsoft says Axon built Draft One using Azure OpenAI Service to transcribe body-worn camera audio and draft police report narratives, “cut[ting] report-writing time in half.” Theoretically, officers must review, edit, and approve the reports before submission. But the central problem remains: A.I. will likely have a dominant role in creating official government narratives.
In criminal justice, the police report is the first official narrative of an incident or crime, one that significantly influences charging decisions, plea negotiations, judicial review, media coverage, and public perception. An initial report that is slanted, incomplete, or generated from a flawed transcript can cause incalculable damage to the integrity of criminal cases.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) stated in a July 10, 2025 report that Axon’s Draft One “seems deliberately designed to avoid audits that could provide any accountability to the public” and that “it’s often impossible to tell which parts of a police report were generated by AI and which parts were written by an officer.”
According to EFF, Draft One does not review the full body camera recording. It processes the audio dialogue through a ChatGPT-like system but does not analyze the video itself. That means the A.I. may miss crucial visual context: body language, movement, distance, gestures, resistance, confusion, surrounding conditions, or what officers and civilians were doing while speaking.
Officers are then expected to correct whatever the A.I. misunderstood, mis-transcribed, or omitted before pasting the final text into the official report. However, once the Draft One window is closed, the original A.I.-generated draft disappears. The result is a potentially incomplete and unauditable process. The public, defendants, judges, and oversight bodies may never know what the A.I. got wrong, what the officer changed, or how much of the official police narrative began as machine-generated text.
The surveillance side is equally troubling. In 2024, Axon acquired Fusus, a real-time crime center platform. Axon says Fusus aggregates live video, data, and sensor feeds from “virtually any source” and can connect fixed cameras and body-worn cameras during unfolding incidents.
Axon’s own materials describe a system capable of pulling together CCTV, body camera feeds, geolocation data, automated license plate readers, drone feeds, gunshot detection, CAD data, community cameras, and other sources into a “single pane of glass.” In practical terms, that means government agencies can merge public cameras, private cameras, body cameras, drones, license plate data, location information, and A.I. analytics into one centralized surveillance picture — a chilling capability.
Axon has also been actively involved in facial recognition research. In December 2025, the Associated Press reported that Axon’s pilot program in Edmonton, Canada, involving A.I.-equipped police body cameras and a watchlist of “about 7,000 people,” had raised alarms. According to the article,
a former member of Axon’s AI ethics board, which led the company to temporarily abandon facial recognition in 2019, told the Associated Press he’s concerned Axon is moving forward without enough public debate, testing, and expert vetting about the societal risks and privacy implications.
In addition, the AP reported in 2022 that the company’s development of a TASER-equipped drone caused the “majority of its ethics board to resign.” These drones, according to Axon leadership, were intended to “help prevent the next Uvalde, Sandy Hook or Columbine” by flying in schools.
Axon has since acquired Dedrone, a counter-drone company focused on airspace awareness and security for public safety and national security customers. In this video, Axon boasts of an “ecosystem” that is “a connected network of hardware, software and sensor solutions that work together to protect more lives in more places.”
Is Axon monopolizing the public safety tech market?
The company dominates the public safety technology market. Plaintiffs in antitrust litigation alleged that Axon has “unlawfully monopolized” approximately 95 percent of the long-range TASER market, while the FTC challenged Axon’s acquisition of rival body-camera company VieVu, citing concerns about monopolization of the body-worn camera systems market for large metropolitan police departments. Although the FTC later withdrew the administrative complaint after years of litigation, an American Bar Association analysis said Axon had solidified its market dominance and that the merits of the FTC’s allegations were never tested.
Its first-quarter 2026 results show that software and services revenue grew 35 percent to $355 million and that A.I. product revenue grew more than 700 percent year over year. Counter-drone revenue grew more than 300 percent.
In 2026, Senators Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Mark Kelly (R-Ariz.) introduced the Stop Excessive Force in Immigration Act, which would impose use-of-force standards and transparency requirements on immigration enforcement. The bill would mandate body cameras for covered DHS immigration enforcement personnel. In February 2026, the Guardian reported that Axon had a $5.1-million DHS contract for body cameras and cloud storage licenses, and that Congress had proposed $20 million for body cameras after lobbying from the company. Axon reportedly spent more than $1.4 million in the second half of 2025 lobbying on issues including cameras, counter-drone systems, and digital evidence. The same report said Gallego had received more than $20,000 from Axon’s CEO and executives since 2017, according to FEC records.
Kerfuffle in home state
Axon has raised alarms in its home state as well. In September 2020, it purchased roughly 74 acres of prime Arizona State Trust Land in Scottsdale for $49.1 million. Early planning materials centered on expanding its corporate campus and commercial development, not its more secretive plans for a residential project. Soon the project grew into something far larger: a mixed-use campus in Scottsdale with thousands of residential units, a hotel, retail, and the headquarters. Axios reported that Axon wanted to add the additional mixed-use properties around the headquarters, despite existing restrictions tied to the land.
Residents pushed back, gathering roughly 26,000 signatures for a referendum on Ordinance No. 4658, the November 2024 rezoning approval for Axon’s Scottsdale project. But before voters could decide, state lawmakers advanced SB1543, later signed into law, which effectively blocked the referendum.
The episode showed that Axon is not only building a massive law enforcement technology ecosystem and embedding itself in government agencies; in Scottsdale, Axon also proved to be a powerful player in local politics, with a state law that Scottsdale officials said appeared crafted to allow the company to bypass a local vote.