World's Largest Alumina Refinery Outside China Abruptly Halves Output On NatGas Disruption

 Norwegian aluminum producer Norsk Hydro's Alunorte plant in Brazil, one of the world's largest alumina refineries, reduced output by 50% following disruptions to natural gas availability.

Bloomberg reports that disruptions to NatGas availability at Alunorte forced a 50% reduction in output and sent aluminum prices in London to a seven-week high. Hydro said production would return to full capacity once gas supplies normalize.

Aluminum rose nearly 2% in London and traded at $3,373 a metric ton. Alumina futures gained 1% in Shanghai.

NatGas is critical to Alunorte because alumina refining requires high-temperature heat and steam. The gas powers the Bayer process, which refines bauxite: 

• Digestion: Bauxite is mixed with caustic soda and heated under pressure to dissolve the aluminum-bearing minerals.
• Evaporation and steam generation: Large boilers provide steam throughout the refinery.
• Calcination: Aluminum hydroxide is heated to around 1,832F to remove water and produce smelter-grade alumina.

The disruption means that Alunorte cannot maintain enough steam and furnace heat to operate its production lines, forcing the refinery to reduce throughput. For context, Alunorte is the world's largest single-site alumina refinery and the largest outside China. It is located in Barcarena, Pará, and has an annual capacity of 6.3 million metric tons.

Inventories in London Metal Exchange warehouses have fallen to 250,000 tons, the lowest level since November 1990. Norsk Hydro recently warned that the annual global aluminum deficit could top 900,000 tons if trade through the Strait of Hormuz remained disrupted.

Also in the industrial metals space, copper futures in London are trading above $14,000 per ton as metal inflows into the US continue ahead of President Trump's expected tariff, effectively tightening global supplies.

Surging prices for both industrial metals will only make electrification and decarbonization even more expensive.

"Copper and aluminum are important beneficiaries of electrification and decarbonization," said UniCredit SpA strategist Thomas Strobel. "While copper's investment case is driven by structural supply constraints, aluminum benefits from lightweighting, grid expansion and recycling. Together, they offer complementary exposure to some of the strongest long-term trends in the global economy."

https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/worlds-largest-alumina-refinery-outside-china-abruptly-halves-output-natgas-disruption

British Youth Taught To Chant 'Our Country Is An Arab Country' At Pro-Gaza Camp

 by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

More than 100 young people gathered in the English countryside for what organisers called a summer school. Instead of hiking and games, they were led in Arabic chants calling for victory over Zionism and declaring "our country is an Arab country."

Footage of the event, later posted by the organisers themselves, has forced a public investigation and raised serious questions about what is being allowed to take place on British soil under the banner of "youth education."

The four-day residential, organised by Palestinian Youth Movement Britain, took place at the Youth Hostel Association's Edale Activity Centre in the Peak District over the late May bank holiday.

Participants recited anti-Israel slogans and discussed the "next phase of our national liberation struggle."

Classroom sessions featured lectures on Ghassan Kanafani, the former spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a group designated as a terrorist organisation by the United States and the European Union.

A banner in Arabic declared "Our revolution is for victory."

In videos shared by the group, a woman leads the attendees in chants that include "We will crush Zionism" and "Young people, rise up, our revolution is an Arab revolution."

One version captured by The Telegraph translates as: "We will have victory over Zionism, we will return, young people rise up, our country is an Arab country."

The same organisation later organised a community football tournament in North Kensington. Photographs showed children wearing shirts numbered 7 and 10, widely interpreted as a reference to the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel.

An organiser appeared in a shirt bearing the number 40 and the slogan "The future is decolonial."

Palestinian Youth Movement Britain describes itself as a grassroots movement organising Palestinian and Arab youth "to struggle for Palestinian liberation."

Its own Instagram post about the Peak District gathering stated: "Together we discussed what the last two years have looked like in our region, and our role as diaspora youth in the next phase of our national liberation struggle."

The event mixed political and historical sessions with a hike and a cultural night of "revolutionary songs and poetry."

The Youth Hostel Association has opened an investigation. A spokesman confirmed the booking was private and that YHA "was not involved in organising, delivering or supervising the group's programme or activities."

The organisation stated: "We are aware of the concerns raised regarding footage reportedly recorded during the group's stay. The views or activities of private groups using our facilities do not represent YHA's views or values. YHA is committed to providing welcoming, inclusive, and respectful spaces for everyone. We are actively investigating the circumstances surrounding this booking, including whether any of our terms and conditions or policies may have been breached. We will consider any appropriate action once that review has been completed."

Campaign Against Antisemitism has written to the Charity Commission. The group said: "British summer camps should be places where children build friendships, not where they are exposed to political indoctrination and extremist ideology. Encouraging children to chant slogans calling for the destruction of Zionism is fundamentally at odds with the values of tolerance and mutual respect."

Heidi Bachram, whose family members were murdered and taken hostage by Hamas on 7 October, responded: "It is deeply chilling to see young people in the UK being programmed to hate and inspired by terrorists. Our family was murdered in Israel by those who act on this violent ideology. I fear where this will lead. We need urgent action to stop this vile brainwashing and shut these organisations down."

The Peak District episode is not an isolated curiosity. It sits against a backdrop of rising concern that parts of Britain's diaspora activism have shifted from protest into the systematic transmission of rejectionist ideology to the next generation.

When young people in the heart of England are taught to chant that "our country is an Arab country" and to celebrate figures linked to designated terrorist groups, the question is no longer whether something has gone wrong.

The question is how long authorities will continue treating it as someone else's problem.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/british-youth-taught-chant-our-country-arab-country-pro-gaza-camp

British Police Unit Flags Over 100 Social Media Posts For Arrest Amid Immigration Backlash

 Via American Greatness,

A specialist British police unit created to track online sentiment has referred more than 100 social media posts to local forces for potential arrest, according to data obtained through Freedom of Information requests and reported by The Times of London.

The National Internet Intelligence Investigations unit notified local police about 106 posts, with 50 of those flagged in June alone, in the aftermath of disclosures surrounding the murder of teenager Henry Nowak.

Nowak was stabbed to death by Vikrum Digwa, and his pleas for help were reportedly ignored by officers who doubted the dying student after his killer claimed to be a victim of racism.

Footage of Nowak’s final moments spread widely online and triggered protests and riots in Southampton, fueling accusations of two-tier policing among critics who argued Nowak was treated differently from his killer because he was white.

The task force traces its origins to the Southport riots, which broke out after Axel Rudakubana, a teenager of Rwandan heritage, murdered three young girls and wounded 10 others in a mass stabbing at a Taylor Swift-themed dance event.

Rather than reckon with the role immigration policy played in the tragedy, the Labour government under then-Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer labeled the public backlash “far-right” and launched a sweeping crackdown, arresting more than 1,876 people, including some individuals whose only offense was a social media post.

Police chiefs declined to detail the specific posts flagged by the unit, saying disclosure could jeopardize ongoing investigations.

They nonetheless acknowledged the initiative remains “still in the early stages of being established,” a signal that the volume of flagged posts is likely to grow.

Britain already ranks among the most aggressive Western nations in policing online speech. 

The Times of London has estimated that police made 33 arrests per day in 2023 over allegedly offensive online content, totaling 12,183 arrests for the year, all before this new task force reached full operation.

The National Police Coordination Centre, the same body that oversaw Britain’s policing response during COVID-19 lockdowns, defended the unit’s mission, saying it “supports policing’s understanding of protest-related activity in the online environment by developing a broader picture of emerging, potential risks.”

The centre added: “Looking across force boundaries enables the identification of issues that may not be evident from information held within individual force areas alone.”

The online monitoring effort follows a pattern set during the pandemic, when the British government deployed the Army’s 77 Brigade, a specialist “information warfare” unit, to track and influence public opinion, including monitoring journalists and politicians critical of lockdown policy.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/british-police-unit-flags-over-100-social-media-posts-arrest-amid-immigration-backlash

Crowley wins Wisconsin's Democratic primary for governor

 Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley beat Wisconsin Assembly member Francesca Hong in Wisconsin's Democratic gubernatorial primary on Wednesday.

Crowley had a narrow win, as an NBC News poll showed he garnered 39.8% of the votes as opposed to Hong's 39.4%, with the majority of the votes counted, positioning himself as the best candidate to take on Republican Representative Tom Tiffany in the November election. He could potentially become Wisconsin's first black governor.

"From day one, this campaign has been about what comes next for Wisconsin: making life more affordable, strengthening our schools, creating good-paying jobs, and making sure opportunity reaches every corner of our state. Wisconsin, let's get to work," Crowley wrote in a post on X.

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Crowley-wins-Wisconsin's-Democratic-primary-for-governor/66903881

'FT: US may have warned Kyiv not to strike third-party oil ships'

 United States Vice President JD Vance asked Ukraine not to target non-Russian tankers using a Russian port to export oil products, the Financial Times (FT) reported on Wednesday.

According to several sources, including some Ukrainian ones, Vance conveyed the message to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during their phone call on July 31. Allegedly, Vance referred to oil coming from countries such as Kazakhstan to the Russian port of Novorossiysk on the shores of the Black Sea.

The alleged warning came amid concerns about global oil supply stemming from the complex situation with the Strait of Hormuz.

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/US-may-have-warned-Kyiv-not-to-strike-third-party-oil-ships/66901213

AI Is Already Beating Human Doctors in Medical Tests

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems may outperform doctors at diagnosing patients. In a recent series of experiments led by researchers at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, a preview of the OpenAI large language model (LLM) known as o1 bested human physicians in multiple tests of clinical and diagnostic reasoning.

"We tested the AI model against virtually every benchmark, and it eclipsed both prior models and our physician baselines," said Harvard Medical School professor Arjun K. Manrai, one of the study's senior authors. Using case studies, the researchers had o1—an older model since usurped by o3—generate a list of possible diagnoses. It included the right diagnosis 78 percent of the time, while physicians were successful about 30 percent of the time.

In another test, o1 was given five "clinical vignettes" drawn from real cases and asked about next steps. Two physicians judged its responses. The average score for o1 was 89 percent, compared to 34 percent for human doctors given the same test.

The researchers also looked at o1's abilities to diagnose emergency room cases, where clinical data might be lacking. "Overall, o1 outperformed both [an earlier LLM] and two expert attending physicians, as assessed by two other attending physicians who both were blinded to the source of the differential diagnosis," notes the study, which was published on April 30 in Science. The LLM especially outperformed human doctors when it came to diagnosis at the initial, triage stage, identifying "the exact or very close diagnosis….in 67.1% of cases," while the two human doctors did so in only 55.3 percent and 50 percent of cases, respectively.

These results track with other recent research. AI-assisted mammograms could be better at detecting breast cancer, per a Swedish study published by The Lancet in January.

Using abdominal C.T. scans from patients who were eventually diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, an AI model developed by the Mayo Clinic detected this deadly disease an average of 475 days and up to three years earlier than clinicians did. "Attaining such early detection would substantially augment the probability of cure and improved survival," researchers led by the Mayo Clinic's Sovanlal Mukherjee noted in the medical journal Gut.

Robo-docs are not likely to take over healthcare anytime soon. And "humans should be the ultimate baseline," as Peter Brodeur, one of the authors of the Harvard study, put it in a press release. But experiments like these suggest that AI models could competently assist in a variety of diagnostic and medical management contexts, and perhaps even produce better patient outcomes—if we let them.

Nevada now bans AI systems from saying anything that "implicitly indicates" they are "capable of providing professional mental or behavioral health care" and from providing any service "that would constitute the practice of professional mental or behavioral health care." An Illinois law passed last year says AI cannot provide therapy services and therapists cannot use AI to "make independent therapeutic decisions" or "detect emotions or mental states." Several states—including Ohio, California, Minnesota, and Kentucky—are considering similar laws. (At the same time, some state bills would mandate that AI chatbots be capable of detecting and responding to mental health issues.)

Measures like these could hamper AI's potential to diagnose diseases with more accuracy than human doctors alone can.

https://reason.com/2026/08/09/ai-beats-doctors/

Dr. Oz Takes Aim at the $100 Billion Hospital Drug Scheme

 

The 340B hospital drug discount program crossed the $100 billion threshold in 2025, a stunning 23% one-year increase. It’s probably the biggest federal program that most people have never heard of.

The original idea of the program was simple. Manufacturers sell outpatient drugs cheaply to safety-net hospitals to serve low-income patients. The big nonprofit hospital systems instead constructed a sprawling scheme to buy drugs at a huge discount, bill taxpayers and insurance plans at full price, and pocket the difference.

Dr. Oz  has proposed an obvious fix: pay hospitals based on what the drugs actually cost.  The  year-one savings:  $4.55 billion for Medicare and $1.15 billion in patient out-of-pocket costs. And demand full transparency. When CMS asked hospitals what they actually pay for drugs, less than one-of-three hospitals responded.

https://committeetounleashprosperity.com/hotlines/dr-oz-takes-aim-at-the-100-billion-hospital-drug-scheme/