Youth Sports Leagues Mandating Digital IDs, Selling Kids’ Biometrics for Profit

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child with facial recognition and youth football players

by Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D.
August 12, 2026

National and local youth sports leagues are harvesting children’s biometric data for profit while telling parents it’s a requirement for their child to play, according to Michelle and Doug Bottoms. Attorney Greg Glaser said the practice violates the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

 The parents of a young teen who reached out to a lawyer after learning that the flag football leagues hosting their son’s team tournaments required a

But the teen’s mother, Michelle Bottoms, is quick to warn other parents that the collection of children’s biometric data by youth sports is “literally happening all across the country.”

And there are “no guardrails” when it comes to what companies can do with kids’ data. “Because once they have it, someone else has it. It’s not yours anymore,” she said.

‘No guardrails’ on how companies use kids’ data

It was in the fall of 2025 that Virginia residents Michelle and Doug Bottoms first discovered that the flag football leagues hosting their then-12-year-old son’s team tournaments required a digital ID for all players.

Representatives of RCX Sports — which operates NFL Flag, the NFL’s flag football program — told the Bottoms that NFL Flag had partnered with the data broker company National Sports ID (NSID).

Under the new partnership, NFL Flag required all players to upload a digital headshot and age-verification documents to the data broker before they could play in the tournaments.

Submitting their son’s biometric data didn’t feel right to the Bottoms. “We started tearing into the terms of service, which takes time,” Doug said.

That’s when Doug and Michelle discovered there were “no safeguards at all” when it came to their son’s biometric data.

The terms of service agreements gave the data broker, which contracted with the sports leagues, the right to share the child’s biometric data with their partners, affiliates and foreign countries.

According to Doug, the companies are creating digital ID profiles for children as a business asset, with no requirement to delete the data. The data could trade hands if and when the business is sold or merged. Parents and children don’t control the data. “The companies do,” he said.

“There’s no guardrails on where it can go and what they can do with it — and that’s the scary part,” Michelle said, “because once they have it, someone else has it. It’s not yours anymore.”

Industry ‘racing to normalize digital IDs for children through sports participation’

As Doug and Michelle soon learned, the practice of requiring digital ID for kids’ sports extends far beyond their own experience with their son.

RCX Sports has a wide reach. In addition to operating NFL Flag, it is also the youth arm for other national sports leagues, including the NBA, Women’s National Basketball Association, MLS, NHL and the National Baseball League.

Attorney Greg Glaser, who handles Children’s Health Defense (CHD) digital privacy lawsuits, said NFL Flag alone operates over 1,800 locally run leagues with over 585,000 youth athletes in all 50 states and Canada.

That means the collection of children’s biometric data in youth sports is “literally happening all across the country,” Michelle said.

For example, another tournament-hosting organization, Flag Football Life, partnered with Zorts Sports to require digital IDs for players. Zorts Sports verifies kids’ IDs by scanning their faces when they show up to play, and comparing the image to the child’s digital headshot submitted by the parents.

Doug called the system “dystopian.” He said, “There’s no other word for it, where kids are just lining up to have their faces scanned in order to check into a sporting event.”

But according to the Zorts Sports website, its “Flash Face ID technology” allows for quick check-ins and roster checks, “simply by pointing the camera at each player.”

Zorts Sports and NSID claim their ID and age-verification tools save coaches time.

But according to Glaser, the companies are monetizing the data they harvest from children. “The privacy policies admit to profiling children and families for ‘targeted advertising strategies,’” he said.

Companies also track children’s social media history and use it to market to them and their families. According to the NSID website, sport organizations that partner with the company can use the data to drive sales by running targeted ad campaigns on Google or Facebook.

Zorts has shared over $1.1 million with tournament organizers, Glaser said. “That creates a coercive financial loop, designed to get leagues to mandate the companies’ platforms” in exchange for financial gain, he said.

And the issue is growing worse — because the companies are expanding how they use the data they collect, according to Glaser, who said:

“Zorts is feeding the Flash Biometrics database, a subsidiary that advertises its facial recognition platform for government, educational institutions, financial services and large-scale events far beyond youth sports. The industry is racing to normalize digital IDs for children through sports participation.”

FTC not enforcing federal law intended to protect kids’ privacy

Doug and Michelle Bottoms contacted Glaser to help them secure an exemption so their son could avoid the leagues’ digital ID requirement.

“The Bottoms family, backed by CHD, successfully forced these leagues to accept manual, paper-based age verification,” Glaser said.

They showed that making digital ID a requirement for kids to play flag football was illegal — because the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) prohibits operators from conditioning participation on the disclosure of more personal information than is reasonably necessary.

The leagues were able to manually verify the teen “without any problem,” Glaser said, “But they refuse to offer this traditional and less invasive option to the general public.”

On Dec. 9, 2025, Glaser filed a complaint on behalf of the Bottoms with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

The complaint calls on the FTC to enforce COPPA. It also asks the agency to mandate that digital IDs in youth sports leagues be voluntary and operate on an opt-in basis.

The FTC should also protect children’s data by prohibiting companies from sharing children’s data with company “partners,” affiliates and foreign entities unless parents explicitly consent to it in an uncoerced way, according to the complaint.

The FTC confirmed that it has entered the Bottoms’ complaint in its database of cases. However, the agency has not indicated that it has launched an investigation or plans to enforce COPPA, Glaser said.

When asked if and when the agency plans to take action, an FTC spokesperson told The Defender in an email that the agency “can’t comment on these matters.”

Using a CHD action alert, over 2,000 people so far have urged the FTC to immediately begin investigating the data broker companies and mandate voluntary “opt-in” defaults for any digital ID in youth sports, Glaser said.

“This public pressure is essential to move the FTC toward actual enforcement,” he said.

FTC signals support for digital ID for children

Recent FTC actions suggest that the agency favors digital ID for children.

A Jan. 28 FTC meeting transcript shared with The Defender revealed that the FTC was considering age-verification technologies as a way to ensure that children do not access unauthorized online content.

On Feb. 25, the FTC announced it would not bring a COPPA against certain website and online service operators that collect, use and disclose personal information for the sole purpose of determining a user’s age via age verification technologies.

“Age verification technologies are some of the most child-protective technologies to emerge in decades,” said Christopher Mufarrige, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, in a press release.

The FTC isn’t alone in defending age-verification technologies. In a Feb. 10 letter, 40 state attorneys general (AGs) urged federal lawmakers to support the U.S. Senate version of the Kids Online Safety Act.

On Aug. 5, the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee advanced a package of bills, including the Kids Online Safety Act, which would require government officials and agencies to devise a plan for how computers, cellphones and operating systems could verify people’s age.

“The FTC’s idea of a solution is tech advancement, while we really need regulation prohibiting the aggregation of children’s data,” Doug said.

According to Doug, the FTC should also investigate what is being done with the data of children whose parents did not know they could seek an exemption from the leagues’ digital ID mandate and surrendered their child’s biometric data.

“There’s potentially some damage that’s been done to some very innocent children who just want to play a sport,” he said. “Where’s their data now and how is it being used? Should there be required deletions of data, if that’s even possible?” he asked.

Will Virginia’s AG get involved?

On March 13, the Bottoms sent a letter to Virginia’s AG office about how the leagues’ practice also violates Virginia’s consumer data protection law.

Virginia AG Jay Jones was not one of the 40 AGs who urged Congress to pass the Kids Online Safety Act.

The Bottoms urged the AG office’s consumer protection division to coordinate with the FTC to ensure that both federal and state privacy laws are enforced.

“The safety of Virginia’s children should not be the admission price for youth sports,” the letter stated.

The Bottoms also asked the AG office to seek civil penalties of up to $7,500 per violation if the leagues fail to implement a permanent, non-digital opt-out for Virginia families.

“Many children and parents and families have no idea what the leagues are doing,” Michelle said. That needs to stop, she said.

Doug agreed. “There’s clearly powerful entities that want digital ID. Nobody voted for them.”

Digital IDs should never be a requirement for access to any part of society, Doug added.

The Virginia AG office did not immediately respond to our request for comment.

Via Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/no-guardrails-youth-sports-leagues-mandate-digital-id-sell-kids-biometrics-profit/

George Soros and the Black Hands that Cast a Shadow Over Tiananmen in 1989

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Cynthia Chung

How China Escaped Shock Therapy: Zhao Ziyang’s Controlled Opposition, the CIA’s Operation Yellowbird, George Soros and Tiananmen Square Part III

This is the third instalment to the Tiananmen series, for the first and second instalments refer here and here, which are essential reading in order to fully follow this story.

As already discussed in this Tiananmen series, Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang’s think tank the System Reform Institute (SRI) served as the official Chinese partner, administrator, and political shield of George Soros’ operations in China during the 1980s.

It was Zhao Ziyang with support and backing from the System Reform Institute that was responsible for the introduction of economic policies that unleashed hyperinflation and corruption that reached a peak between the periods of 1986 and 1989 resulting in protests over this crisis, including the Tiananmen Square debacle in June 1989. In both the cases of the 1986 and 1989 student demonstrations, Fang Lizhi was a lead organiser and influencer, as already discussed in the second instalment.

Fang Lizhi had direct ties to the NED, as do his lead student disciples who were involved in the 1989 protests, and was at the top of China’s list as a “black hand” behind the Tiananmen Square debacle. His safe passage out of China was directly facilitated by the CIA along with British and American diplomatic channels. This can be seen as a branch of Operation Yellowbird which will be the focus of the fourth instalment.

During the period of May until mid-June 1986 a Chinese delegation under the leadership of the Program Office (which was formed by pro-shock therapists) along with the System Reform Institute held 111 meetings with George Soros and co. in Hungary and Yugoslavia discussing the matter of China’s economic reform, that is, how to proceed in “opening up” what Soros called a “closed society.”

There is no official record of the details discussed in these meetings, only a record that the meetings took place.[1] However, what is clear is its attempt to hijack the Chinese government’s role in deciding its own economic policy, where crucial economic matters were discussed by select Chinese representatives (who happen to all be pro-shock therapy at the end of the day) and representatives of the World Bank and Soros all together in one room thousands of miles away from China’s capital.

Because Soros’ Open Society could not legally operate as a foreign foundation in China without a high-level government sponsor, the SRI agreed to co-found the “Reform and Opening of China” (aka the “China Fund”) in 1986. This included a $1 million endowment to foster “emerging civil society and sponsor research.”

This was accomplished with Bao Tong’s direct political backing, what was effectively a direct backing from Zhao Ziyang. Thus, the Soros “China Fund” had effectively received direct backing to operate in China via the then Premier of China. Bao Tong was Zhao Ziyang’s Policy Secretary throughout his entire career in the 1980s’, from when Zhao was Premier of China, from 1980-1987, to his transition to General Secretary, from 1987-1989.

Bao Tong was also Director of the Drafting Committee for the CCP 13th Party Congresses, known for its strong support of market reform and opening up under Deng Xiaoping. Prior to this, he was a committee member and then deputy director of the Chinese State Commission for Economic Reform. During the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, he was one of the very few Chinese senior officials to express understanding with the demonstrating students.

Bao Tong was also the writer of Zhao’s speeches and editorials supporting a democratic approach to the student movement.

Thus, Bao Tong can be viewed as Zhao’s most loyal ally and a direct representation of Zhao Ziyang. Bao Tong remained loyal to Zhao throughout his entire life and was responsible for publishing Zhao’s memoirs.

It should also be noted that Adi Ignatius helped to translate and edit Zhao’s memoirs “Prisoner of the State” in English, in cooperation with Bao Tong and his son Bao Pu. Adi’s brother is David Ignatius, a well-known Washington Post writer who wrote the widely cited September 1991 column “Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups” which announced the rise of the NED as a vehicle for overt political action. In the piece is included a landmark quote from the NED’s co-founder and former president Allen Weinstein where he told Ignatius “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” Referring to the newly created NED.[2]

Adi Ignatius is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Asia Society.[3] As we will see the Asia Society is directly connected to the NED.

Other Chinese backers to this union between Soros and Zhao’s think tank the System Reform Institute (SRI) were Li Xianglu, Zhao Ziyang’s former personal secretary, and Zhu Jiaming a member of the SRI,[4] who was also the lead organiser of the South American tour where the SRI studied the cases of Chile and Brazil’s economic “successes” which also happened to coincide with the formation of military dictatorships, and in Chile’s case a direct outcome of shock therapy. This tour was funded and recommended by George Soros and was discussed in the first instalment. Zhu Jiaming was a supporter of shock therapy despite being a member of the SRI.

In 1988 Zhu Jiaming joined China’s International Trust Investment Corporation (CITIC) where he worked closely with Li Xianglu where both were directly involved with Soros’ China Fund. Because CITIC overlapped with Chinese intelligence, it appears that this is the link that revealed details of the true nature of the SRI’s relationship with Soros’ China Fund which was effectively a foreign led economic/political coup.

Soros appointed Chen Yizi (director of the SRI) as the Chinese co-chairman of his “China Fund.” Chen Yizi would also receive safe passage out of China through Operation Yellowbird. Chen Yizi was also a direct supporter of shock therapy and publicly expressed his admiration for Pinochet.

Mainstream accounts of this history deny Soros’s implication in the Tiananmen Square debacle, especially Soros’s ties to the CIA. However, as we will see in this paper, Soros does have close overlap and joint ventures with the NED which is a branch of the CIA. Thus, attempts to dismiss China’s accusations of Soros organizing an economic and political coup via Zhao Ziyang’s network as part of a broader CIA operation, as we will see, do not hold water. Rather, there is a great deal of evidence to showcase these accusations as quite accurate.

We will resume the story here and discuss how all of the major players leading up to the Tiananmen Square debacle discussed thus far in this series have direct ties to the NED, CIA, New School, MI6 as well as British and American diplomatic channels. We will also see how these channels, including North American Baptist Churches and the Triads facilitated their safe passage out of China.[5]

Zhao Ziyang: an Anti-Hero of the People

At the Politburo Standing Committee’s meetings on May 16 and 19, 1988, Zhao Ziyang once again joined Deng Xiaoping’s call for price reform.

In his 1988 address, Zhao made it clear that to ensure political stability, a new public security law was required that the State Council could invoke in an emergency.

Isabella Weber writes in How China Escaped Shock Therapy:

Zhao argued that Poland’s experience of social uprisings had shown such a law to be necessary (Fang, 2014, 339). Just eleven days before this Standing Committee meeting, on May 5, special troops of the Polish Interior Ministry had cracked down on a major strike wave that was sweeping the country in reaction to falling real incomes. This, in my eyes, erases any doubts about whether Zhao anticipated that inflation would be harmless. He recognized the possibly explosive consequences of rising prices. But in the spring of 1988, he seems to have been prepared to use force, if necessary, to finally make marketization happen.

…The justification for the 1988 price-reform push was rooted in the logic of package reform – even though Wu Jinglian, Liu Guoguang, and other package reformers criticized that it did not include sufficiently strict austerity measures…[8]

Thus, contrary to the mainstream western narrative, that promoted Zhao as a “conscientious objector” and concerned about the students’ safety during the Tiananmen Square debacle, the truth is that Zhao was not only aware that military force was likely needed to push through the price reform package, but he was the one who in fact prepared the very groundwork for a military crackdown against the predictable protests that would ensue from his and Deng’s push for radical price reform in 1988.

It was Zhao’s “new public security law” that had established the apparatus and protocol that culminated in the disorganized mayhem of the June 3-4, 1989 events.

Interestingly, and quite tellingly of how the game is truly played in various formations of controlled opposition in the so-called debate between Zhao’s think tank, the System Reform Institute (SRI), and pro-package reformers (aka shock therapists) on how China should economically reform – during this tense period of the 1988 radical price reform led by Zhao Ziyang, the SRI meets with the Mont Pelerin Society in 1988.

On June 12, 1988, leading members of the SRI Chen Yizi and Wang Xiaoqiang left for West Germany once again around the matter of China’s price reform.[9] Just like in 1986 when the SRI met a delegation organised by George Soros, they now met with a delegation in West Germany to discuss the matter of China’s “opening up.” Among this delegation was Herbert Giersch, the then-president of ‘the global neoliberal thought collective the Mont Pelerin Society and of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.’[10]

‘Giersch counted among his credentials relating to the West German postwar economic reconstruction that he had received his PhD under Alfred Müller-Armack’s supervision. Müller-Armack is considered to be one of the intellectual fathers of the ordoliberal idea of a social market economy.’[11]

In 1933, Alfred Müller-Armack published a book with some praise of Nazism entitled Ideas of the State and Economy Order in the New Reich. He worked as an advisor to the Nazi regime and the German army and contributed to discussions about the post-war economic order.

Müller-Armack was also a member of the Mont Pelerin Society, founded by Friedrich Hayek in 1947.[12]

After the war, he joined the Christian Democratic Union and he coined the phrase “Social Market Economy” in his book Economic Steering and Market Economy, written in 1946 and published in 1947.

Recall what I wrote in the first instalment to this Tiananmen series:

[…]

One could say that this is the true intention of shock therapy – political instability that opens the doors to a foreign led corporate regime change with a great deal of similarity to Mussolini’s Corporatism. Mussolini’s Corporatism had spawned out of Sorel’s National Socialism. In fact, Neo-Conservatism in the United States finds its origins in this as well, as I discuss in the above cited paper. It is for this reason that there was a great deal of support within the American financier class for Italian fascism. It is important here to remember not to get too caught up in “isms,” but rather to look more at the specifics in economic policy, for as we can see in just this short paragraph we find the words “corporatism”, “neo-conservatism” and “nation book

[…]

I bring this up here to showcase that there is a great deal of similarity to what Milton Friedman and the World Bank were proposing in their “shock therapy” to China, to that of Mussolini’s Corporatism and I don’t think this was a coincidence.

[…]

Viahttps://cynthiachung.substack.com/p/the-black-hands-that-casted-a-shadow

Bombing mountains, missing the target: Why Saudi aistrikes can’t destroy Yemen’s missile infrastructure

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By Arman Shariati

2026/10/14

Saudi Arabia’s expensive air defenses and sustained airstrikes have failed to neutralize Yemen’s resilient missile capabilities and underground infrastructure, exposing the strategic limitations of technological superiority against adaptive, decentralized warfare.

The Saudi infrastructure spurring its petroleum economy is under sustained, repeated, and increasingly precise retaliatory attacks from the Yemeni armed forces as tensions escalate.

For a kingdom that has spent hundreds of billions of dollars constructing what it imagined would be an impenetrable security architecture, US fighter jets, French air defense batteries, German naval vessels, British training contracts, and the crown jewel of it all, the US-built Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, the recent developments have sent jitters through the power corridors of Riyadh.

Yemeni armed forces lack sophisticated weapons industries, satellite constellations, or foreign exchange reserves. Still, the Sana’a government has managed to effectively sever Saudi Arabia’s access to Bab al-Mandeb, the narrow maritime chokepoint through which a critical fraction of global energy trade flows.

It is this force that compelled the closure of King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh through drone and missile operations, a siege-for-siege response to the years-long Saudi aerial and maritime blockade that has strangled Yemen’s civilian population.

It is this force whose precision strikes on Aramco facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais, on pumping stations, and on refinery infrastructure across the kingdom’s vital petroleum belt have demonstrated, with regularity, that Saudi Arabia cannot defend what matters most to it.

The kingdom’s response has been a characteristic search for foreign saviors. Delegations to Islamabad requesting Pakistani air defense expertise. Urgent consultations in Ankara. Emergency procurement discussions in Washington and London. The image projected is not of a self-sufficient regional power but of an anxious client state, checkbook in hand, shopping for solutions to a self-imposed problem its own military has proven structurally incapable of solving.

King Khalid International Airport burns after a retaliatory Yemeni strike

Air defense collapse, and the THAAD failure

Before turning to the specific subject of Saudi airstrikes against underground Yemeni installations, the most visible symptom of strategic incoherence, it is worth situating that failure within the broader collapse of Saudi military credibility.

Saudi-backed ground forces in Yemen have consisted primarily of foreign forces, Yemeni tribal militias of variable loyalty, and special operations elements from various foreign actors. Against the organized, ideologically motivated, and tactically experienced ground forces of the Sana’a government, they have repeatedly failed to hold terrain.

More damaging to Saudi prestige than any ground reversal, however, has been the comprehensive failure of domestic and foreign air defense systems. The kingdom paid in excess of $15 billion for its THAAD battery, a system purpose-built to intercept ballistic missiles.

The procurement involved years on the American waiting list, diplomatic negotiations at the highest levels, and the deployment of US military personnel to operate and maintain the system.

Saudi leadership purchased THAAD not merely as a military capability but as a political statement: ‘We have bought the best the Americans make, and we are protected.’

Yemeni ballistic missiles, launched in single-digit coordinated salvos, sometimes as few as two or three per strike, have penetrated this layered defense with regularity. Whether through saturation, trajectory manipulation, or simple exploitation of the system’s well-documented limitations against short-range ballistic missiles, Yemeni forces have consistently gotten through.

Saudi military personnel posing with a THAAD launcher

The Air Force that cannot win

By almost any metric of hardware quality, the RSAF is a formidable force on paper. It operates the F-15SA, the Saudi Advanced variant of the F-15 Eagle, in numbers that make it the second-largest F-15 fleet in the world, behind only the United States Air Force itself.

The F-15SA incorporates the APG-63(V)3 Active Electronically Scanned Array radar, the latest mission computer architecture, digital fly-by-wire flight controls, and compatibility with the full American precision munitions inventory.

Alongside the F-15 fleet, the RSAF fields Eurofighter Typhoons, Panavia Tornadoes, and a supporting infrastructure of tankers, electronic warfare aircraft, and intelligence-gathering platforms that most regional air forces can only dream of.

The RSAF has operated over Yemen since March 2015, a decade, with complete air superiority. There is no Yemeni air force capable of contesting the airspace. Saudi pilots fly with impunity in the sense that no enemy aircraft will challenge them.

The operating environment, in terms of air-to-air threat, is essentially zero.

And yet the strategic outcome is failure. The Yemeni military’s ability to launch ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones at targets inside Saudi Arabia, and to do so with increasing accuracy and frequency, has not been degraded in any measurable way.

The missile production infrastructure has not been destroyed. The command structure has not been decapitated. The flow of materiel has not been stopped.

What the RSAF has accomplished, at tremendous financial cost and with horrific humanitarian consequences for the Yemeni population, is the destruction of civilian infrastructure – bridges, markets, hospitals, water treatment facilities, and residential neighborhoods.

The underground problem

The specific absurdity the Saudi Ministry of Defense has presented to the world as evidence of effectiveness involves strikes against underground installations in northern Yemen.

The footage is remarkably consistent in its production values and in its uselessness as evidence, involving dramatic angles, slow-motion detonations, epic orchestral or nasheed-inflected soundtracks, plumes of smoke and dust rising from ridgelines or hillsides, and the implicit claim that something of military significance has been destroyed.

What is actually being shown is a hole in a mountain, or the entrance to a tunnel, or a surface vent of an underground complex.

To understand why this constitutes the expenditure of very expensive munitions for essentially no military return, one must understand the history of underground military infrastructure in Yemen, and the specific context in which Ansarullah developed it.

The Yemeni military in its earliest form, from the first Sa’ada war in 2004 through the subsequent cycles of war before the 2014-2015 collapse of the Saudi-backed Hadi regime, was concentrated largely in the mountainous terrain of Sa’ada governorate.

These highlands are geologically ideal for irregular warfare. The terrain is broken, the rock is workable, and the valleys create natural defensive corridors.

The Saudi Air Force bombing tunnel entrances and causing little more than a few hours of work for construction crews

By the time the Ansarullah movement formed the popular government in Sana’a in 2014-2015 and inherited the full infrastructure of the Yemeni state, including the military bases, ammunition depots, command centers, and technical facilities that had been under construction since the 1970s, it had already developed deep institutional knowledge of subterranean operations.

What it then did was scale. The former Yemeni armed forces had invested substantially in hardened underground facilities, many of them constructed with Soviet and Chinese assistance during the Cold War competition for influence in the Arabian Peninsula.

Some of these facilities were designed to survive exactly the kind of air campaign now being directed against them. The result is a layered underground infrastructure: legacy hardened military sites, expanded and modified; natural cave systems developed into military use; and new purpose-built tunnel complexes constructed during the ongoing war itself, using both local engineering capacity and the technical lessons accumulated over a decade of surviving devastating Saudi airstrikes.

 

What a tunnel strike actually achieves

The operational reality of striking a tunnel complex with conventional air-delivered munitions is well understood in military literature, and the conclusion is uncomfortable for anyone proposing that Saudi airstrikes are achieving meaningful degradation of Yemeni underground facilities.

A strike on a tunnel entrance achieves, at best, a temporary blockage of that specific entrance. The structural integrity of the tunnel itself, which may extend hundreds of meters into solid rock, is essentially unaffected by a bomb detonating at its mouth.

The debris created by the strike can typically be cleared by a team with hand tools and light equipment in a timeframe ranging from hours to a few days, depending on the extent of the collapse and the resources available.

If the complex has multiple entrances, which any competent military facility will, the affected entrance is irrelevant to operational continuity from the moment the strike lands.

 

The B-2 precedent: When America tried and came up short

The limits of even the most capable bunker-busting capability in the world were demonstrated twice by American attacks against Yemeni underground facilities.

In 2024 and 2025, the United States deployed B-2 Spirit strategic bombers against Yemeni targets on at least two documented occasions.

The B-2 is the only aircraft currently in service capable of carrying the GBU-57/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), a weapon specifically designed to destroy hardened underground facilities. The MOP weighs approximately 30,000 pounds, of which roughly 5,300 pounds is explosive fill.

The B-2 strikes on Yemen, involving aircraft worth approximately $2.1 billion each operating from Diego Garcia, did not stop or meaningfully degrade Yemeni missile and drone operations. Attacks against Saudi Arabia and against shipping in the Red Sea corridor continued with no observable reduction in tempo or capability.

In the aftermath of these aggressive attacks, American officials indicated that MOPs had not been used, and that the strikes employed BLU-109 configurations. The explanation offered, that MOPs were available but not used, is curious.

One reading is that the Americans assessed the targets as not requiring MOP-class munitions, implying the strikes achieved their objectives. Another reading, perhaps the most operationally honest, is that the facility hardening had been assessed, the limitations of available munitions were understood, and the strikes were ordered for political and deterrent signaling purposes rather than with genuine expectations of permanent infrastructure destruction.

Alternatively, it is possible that MOPs were used but failed to cause the desired impact. Whatever the reasoning, the operational result is the same. The most expensive aircraft in the world, using serious penetrating munitions, operating with complete air superiority, did not stop Yemeni strikes.

What Is Saudi Arabia actually trying to achieve?

Against this backdrop, a decade of strikes, an unimpaired and growing Yemeni strike capability, and a demonstrated American inability to eliminate the Yemeni resistance with the world’s most capable penetrating weapons, the question of Saudi strategic intent becomes genuinely difficult to answer charitably.Several possible explanations exist, and they are not mutually exclusive.

The footage released recently is domestic and regional political products as much as military communications. Saudi leadership is under significant pressure, from the ruling family itself, from the business community whose assets are being struck, from foreign partners watching the kingdom’s security guarantees erode in real time.

Producing footage of dramatic explosions and pairing it with inspiring music is a way of asserting that something is being done, regardless of whether that something is achieving anything.

Perhaps most honestly, the RSAF may be striking underground entrances and hardened facilities because it has exhausted every other target category and this is what remains on the approved list. The visible Yemeni military infrastructure in exposed positions was struck and restruck in the first years of the aggression.

Mobile missile launchers, a notoriously difficult target category even for the most capable intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance assets, have proven largely elusive. Leadership targets are well protected. Logistics nodes are dispersed and mobile. The mountain tunnel entrance, in this reading, is not a strategic choice but a default, the target that is findable, strikable, and filmable, even if not destroyable.

The structural problem: An Air Force without a purpose it can fulfill

The deeper failure of the RSAF is not a problem of hardware or pilots. It is a problem of strategic function. The RSAF was designed, equipped, and trained for air superiority operations against a peer air force, long-range strike operations against a state with a coherent target set, and close air support for conventional ground forces in maneuver warfare.

None of these missions exist in Yemen. There is no peer air force. The target set is not a coherent state infrastructure that can be collapsed by strategic bombing. It is a distributed, mobile, dispersed, and deeply underground military system that has been hardened specifically against air attack and has had a decade to learn the precise capabilities and habits of the air force striking it.

[…]

Via https://www.presstv.co.uk/Detail/2026/10/13/778262/bombing-mountains-missing-target-why-saudi-airstrikes-cant-destroy-yemen-missile-infrastructure

 

Vaccine Cartel Begins Injecting Endangered Baby Elephants With Experimental mRNA Shots

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Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

The experimental mRNA injection rollout has now reached endangered baby elephants. On October 8, 2026, the Saint Louis Zoo announced that a 1½-year-old Asian elephant named Jet had received his third dose of an experimental mRNA injection targeting elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus (EEHV).

Developed by Baylor College of Medicine in collaboration with zoo researchers, the gene therapy uses lipid nanoparticles to deliver four synthetic mRNA sequences encoding EEHV viral proteins.

Experimental mRNA Gene Therapy Is Expanding Across American Zoos

The research program involves institutions including Houston Zoo, Cincinnati Zoo, Fort Worth Zoo, Rosamond Gifford Zoo, and White Oak Conservation. Saint Louis Zoo has now publicly confirmed vaccinating its young elephant.

A peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Virology in July 2026 evaluated the gene therapy in nine Asian elephants. Elephants received up to FOUR injections containing 400 micrograms of mRNA each. Three of six initially antibody-negative elephants failed to develop detectable antibody responses after their first two injections and required additional booster shots.

Vaccinated Elephants Still Contracted EEHV

Perhaps most notably, a second peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Virology documented that two juvenile elephants at Cincinnati Zoo developed confirmed EEHV infections after receiving two doses of the experimental mRNA injection.

Both animals received their injections in October and November 2024 before testing positive in February and March 2025. The findings show that the mRNA gene therapy does not reliably prevent EEHV infection in elephants.

The expansion of dangerous mRNA technology into endangered wildlife already facing the threat of extinction marks a disturbing new frontier in veterinary medicine.

Via https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/vaccine-cartel-begins-injecting-endangered

Washington’s war consensus will survive midterms

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Photo Credit: The Cradle

José Niño

OCT 15, 2026

West Asia has little reason to stake its security on a change of hands in Congress.

Washington’s political class has already begun preparing for a Democratic takeover of the House. Erin Covey of the Cook Political Report wrote on September 25 that Democrats will most likely gain five to 15 seats, leaving them with 220 to 230 members next year. Decision Desk HQ’s forecast, updated on 13 October, gives Democrats a 77 percent chance of winning the House and a 56 percent chance of flipping the Senate.

A Democratic majority would almost certainly hand the gavel to Hakeem Jeffries. Nothing guarantees it, since the new House must elect its speaker by a majority of members voting for a named candidate. Axios reported in July that a growing set of progressive candidates refuse to commit to him, and one told the outlet, “I hope to have an alternative to Jeffries to vote for.” At the time, no challenger had organized against the Brooklyn Democrat, and he remains the presumptive speaker.

Jeffries and the limits of dissent

Voters who expect Speaker Jeffries to end the Iran war should lower their hopes. Jeffries has attacked the conflict relentlessly, giving voters ample reason to expect opposition from a Democratic House. In a June 24 statement, he declared, “After repeatedly promising to end foreign wars, [US President] Donald Trump and [Secretary of War] Pete Hegseth plunged America into Operation Epic Failure with no objective, strategy or support.”

He has backed efforts to force Iran war powers votes this year and called for an end to the conflict. Jeffries’ objection, however, leaves Washington’s broader policy toward Iran largely intact. He insists that Congress, not the president, holds the power to start offensive wars, while branding Iran a state sponsor of terrorism that must never obtain a nuclear weapon.

He supported the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and voted against legislation restricting sanctions relief, yet he voted for military aid to Israel after Iran’s 2024 attacks and this year voted to reaffirm Iran as the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. In March 2023, he joined 148 fellow Democrats and 171 Republicans to defeat a resolution withdrawing American troops from Syria by 103 to 321.

Even a unified Democratic caucus faces serious obstacles to stopping Trump. On 3 June, the House passed a War Powers resolution 215 to 208, with four Republicans joining every Democrat. The Senate also approved the June measure on 23 June, 50 to 48.

On 23 July, after Trump restarted the war following collapsed peace talks, the House approved another measure, 214 to 208, while the Senate killed Senator Chris Van Hollen’s measure to restrict US military involvement in the conflict, by 47 to 49, with John Fetterman as the lone Democrat voting no.

Trump mocked the June vote online, writing, “Yesterday, in a meaningless vote, the House voted, 4 bad Republicans and all of the Dumocrats, to limit my War Powers, right in the middle of my final negotiations to end the War with the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

He has every reason for confidence. Binding legislation to halt the war or cut its funding would face a presidential veto. Overriding it requires two-thirds of those voting in each chamber, and neither of the war powers resolutions Trump vetoed during his first term secured an override, as PolitiFact recounts. With all 435 House members voting, 230 Democrats would still sit 60 votes short of the required 290.

The veto shield

Trump’s first term shows how the veto has protected his warmaking in West Asia. Of the 10 vetoes he issued from 2017 to 2021, five blocked congressional efforts to curb military involvement or arms sales in the region.

He rejected S.J.Res.7, the Yemen War Powers resolution, on 16 April 2019, calling it “an unnecessary, dangerous attempt to weaken my constitutional authorities,” and the Senate override failed 53 to 45.

On 24 July 2019, he vetoed S.J.Res.36, 37, and 38, which would have blocked arms transfers to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, warning that they would “weaken America’s global competitiveness and damage the important relationships we share with our allies and partners.”

Override attempts collapsed 45 to 40, 45 to 39, and 46 to 41. On 6 May 2020, he vetoed S.J.Res.68, Senator Tim Kaine’s (D–VA) Iran War Powers resolution passed after Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani’s assassination, insisting in his veto message that “This joint resolution is unnecessary because it rests upon a faulty premise.” That override failed 49 to 44.

Republican dissent never reached the numbers needed to overcome those vetoes. Just seven GOP senators backed final passage of the Yemen measures in December 2018 and March 2019, with Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Todd Young, Susan Collins, and Jerry Moran forming the core.

In the House, 16 Republicans including Thomas Massie, Jim Jordan, and Matt Gaetz backed the April 2019 resolution, but only four Republicans supported the arms sale blocks that July. Lawfare’s Scott Anderson observed that half the Republicans who voted to advance the measure in November 2018 “ultimately opposed the joint resolution itself.”

Democrats supplied defectors too, with five Democrats in June 2017, including Joe Manchin and Mark Warner, helping preserve a $510 million munitions sale to Riyadh, while 10 Democrats voted in March 2018 to table the first Yemen resolution.

The party’s hawkish wing endures in the Senate, where John Fetterman, Jacky Rosen, and Chris Coons champion confrontation with Iran and support for Israel, while House Democrats such as Jared Moskowitz, Brad Schneider, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Greg Landsman, and newly elevated Foreign Affairs member Wesley Bell anchor the party’s Israel hawks.

On 29 September, Senate Republicans and Fetterman blocked advancement of Van Hollen’s resolution seeking a State Department report on the killings of nine Americans in the occupied West Bank, 47 to 51, while Rand Paul crossed over in favor.

The escalation Biden kept

This bipartisan consensus explains why Joe Biden failed to reverse Trump’s campaign against Iran. Trump abandoned the JCPOA on 8 May 2018, and launched a maximum pressure campaign that the White House described as “intended to bring Iran’s oil exports to zero, denying the regime its principal source of revenue.”

His administration imposed more than 1,500 sanctions, branded Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist organization in April 2019, the first such label for another state’s military, and assassinated IRGC Quds Force commander Soleimani near Baghdad’s airport on 3 January 2020.

Biden treated that wreckage as leverage through a “compliance for compliance” formula that, according to the Congressional Research Service, envisaged a mutual return to compliance, with the sequencing of sanctions relief and Iranian nuclear steps contested, while Tehran insisted that the party that walked away should lift sanctions first.

Biden kept the IRGC designation and could not promise that a future president would honor any deal. Ali Shamkhani, then-secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, summed up the impasse in November 2021. “The US President, lacking authority, is not ready to give guarantees,” he wrote. Talks stalled under Ebrahim Raisi’s presidency, with disputes over guarantees and safeguards investigations unresolved; Iranian drone transfers to Russia and the response to the 2022 protests further hardened Washington’s position, and Biden left office without rejoining.

In Syria, he maintained the US military presence and Caesar Act sanctions. The Pentagon disclosed in December 2024 that roughly 2,000 troops were deployed, more than twice the previously stated 900. Carnegie’s Diwan captured this continuity in one line: “The difference between Trump and Biden on Syria is tactical rather than strategic.”

Moscow has a name for this pattern, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov complaining in February that Washington had backed away from proposals it offered at the August 2025 Anchorage summit, and echoing Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, who told TASS in 2020 that Russia does not view the US “as a partner who is able to negotiate.” A country that Russian diplomats deem “agreement incapable,” as this author has previously argued, pushes the world toward a multipolar order that Washington can no longer prevent.

Regional powers have also begun acting on their doubts about Washington. On 7 August, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), Turkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, whose collective-defense clause treats an armed attack against any one of the three states as an attack against them all.

Steven A. Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations argued that the pact’s implications extend beyond its formal guarantees. “Rather, it reflects a change underway in the Middle East’s regional order – one that reduces the United States’ decades-long leadership role.”

Cook faulted American policy built on “anything but what the previous President did,” and warned that Trump’s swings between force and diplomacy leave Gulf partners wondering “whether they will be left in the lurch to face an empowered Iran on their own.”

Iran and its Axis of Resistance allies have absorbed months of American and Israeli strikes, yet Tehran still retains the ability to restrict traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, while Washington’s own clients hedge against its unreliability.

Regardless of who holds the gavel in January, Congress will not abandon its hyper-interventionist foreign policy agenda during Trump’s lame duck phase as president. Its anti-war bloc lacks the votes to override a veto on binding legislation, its leaders share the White House’s hawkish premises, and both parties have spent eight years ratifying each other’s escalations.

Any durable settlement will come from the region itself, from governments that have stopped waiting for Washington to keep its word and from an Axis of Resistance that will no longer tolerate the Washington-Tel Aviv axis’s flagrant violations of international law and supremacist ambitions in West Asia.

[…]

Via https://thecradle.co/articles/washingtons-war-consensus-survives-the-midterms

All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars: Iran and the Bankers’ Endgame

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Image: Lloyd’s building (CC BY 2.5)

Ellen Brown

Oct 14, 2026

“The powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.”  —Prof. Caroll Quigley, Georgetown University, Tragedy and Hope (1966)

[…]

The thesis that “All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars” was popularized by Michael Rivero in a 2013 documentary by that name. His accompanying article begins with a quote from Aristotle (384-322 BCE):

The most hated sort [of moneymaking], and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural use of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest.

Rivero then traces how private banking interests have financed and profited from conflicts on both sides for centuries — from the founding of the Bank of England in 1694 to fund William III’s wars to modern regime-change wars.

 

Full-Spectrum Financial Dominance

Other commentators point to the report of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (September 2000), which called for “full-spectrum” U.S. military forces to achieve global preeminence. It postulated the need for a “catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor” to accelerate the military transformation the authors envisioned.

This was followed by a 2007 Democracy Now interview in which Gen. Wesley Clark revealed that weeks after 9/11, he had been shown a classified Pentagon memo outlining plans to “take out seven countries in five years”: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off with Iran. The first six have since been destabilized or regime-changed. Iran, considered the ultimate prize for Middle East dominance and oil control, remains the last one standing.

Why those seven, and why was Iran the ultimate prize? Greg Palast’s 2013 article titled “Larry Summers and the Secret ‘End-Game’ Memo” supplied the missing financial logic. In 1999, the world was opened to unregulated derivatives trading, so that sovereign bonds, oil flows, shipping routes, and war-risk policies could all be collateralized, rehypothecated (pledged multiple times over), and gambled upon. The lynchpin was the 1997 WTO Financial Services Agreement (the Fifth Protocol to GATS), which became operational in 1999.

None of the seven targeted countries joined the WTO, and they were also not members of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). That left them outside the long regulatory arm of the central bankers’ central bank in Switzerland. Other countries that were later identified as “rogue states” were also not members of the BIS, including North Korea, Cuba, and Afghanistan.

As for Iran, it is not only the largest and strongest of the Islamic countries but operates the world’s only fully interest-free (riba-free) banking regime. This stands in direct contrast to the conventional Western model, which relies on interest as its primary revenue mechanism. “Money making money out of itself” underpins the global derivatives complex, which is built on rehypothecated, collateralized debt-at-interest.

The last piece in the financial control grid was detailed in David Rogers Webb’s 2024 book The Great Taking. The Everything Bubble, including what some commentators estimate to be more than a quadrillion dollars in derivative bets, is just waiting for a pin. When it bursts, it will trigger large institutional bankruptcies; and under the legal machinery Webb documents, the derivative players will take all.

The 2026 Hormuz insurance crisis triggered by Lloyd’s of London could be that pin.

[…]

The City of London and Lloyd’s Weaponize Chaos

For more than three centuries, the City of London – the “Square Mile” that is London’s financial center — has financed both sides of wars and sold insurance against the destruction that would follow. Lloyd’s of London is the insurance pillar of the City’s financial control grid. It is not actually an insurance company but is a corporate body that “operates as a partially-mutualized marketplace within which multiple financial backers, grouped in syndicates, come together to pool and spread risk.”

Lloyd’s has built its reputation on always performing, but it performs at a cost. In 1898, it formalized long-standing practice by introducing the “Free of Capture and Seizure” clause, stripping war risks from standard policies so it could charge extortionate premiums when conflict erupted. It exercised that clause in both world wars and is exercising it in 2026.

After the strikes on Iran, Lloyd’s Joint War Committee expanded its “high-risk” zone in the Middle East. Several of its underwriters issued 72-hour cancellation notices effective March 5, and war-risk premiums for Hormuz transits jumped from 0.25% to 1–5% of hull value. Lloyd’s has stressed that coverage remains available — at the right price. But for a $100 million oil tanker, that means an extra $1–5 million per voyage, a premium the owners are understandably reluctant to pay.

The Private Credit Spark

Meanwhile, other dark clouds are hovering over the market. Financial analyst Stephanie Pomboy warns that the $1.5-3 trillion private credit market is in lockdown, forcing fire sales of liquid assets; and the much larger $5 trillion BBB-rated corporate bond market is teetering. Downgrades will force mass selling, and pensions face a $4 trillion shortfall.

The Hormuz crisis supplies the perfect accelerant to this collateral crisis: higher oil prices create inflation, which raises bond yields (interest), collapsing the value of collateral and triggering margin calls across the derivatives game board. Margin calls then force private credit funds into fire sales.

This is one reason some commentators point to the City of London as the real architect of the Middle East chaos. The old war-insurance machine and the new derivatives machine operate together. One creates the chaos premium; the other harvests it through rehypothecation and legal seizure.

Palast and the End Game Memo: Making the World Safe for Derivatives 

Guaranteeing against shipping loss is one type of insurance, but a much bigger insurance trap is the derivatives market. Sold as a form of insurance against market risk, derivatives are a speculative betting game that extracts rents from all major economic flows.

In his 2013 article, Greg Palast presented evidence of a secret 1997 memo to Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers from Timothy Geithner (then U.S. Ambassador to the WTO acting for Summers) describing the “End-Game” of the WTO Financial Services negotiations. Geithner wrote to Summers,

“As we enter the end-game… I believe it would be a good idea for you to touch base with the CEOs ….”

The memo then listed the private phone numbers of Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, Citibank, and Chase Manhattan, numbers which Palast confirmed were real.

What was the end-game? Palast wrote:

US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was pushing hard to de-regulate banks.  That required, first, repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to dismantle the barrier between commercial banks and investment banks.  It was like replacing bank vaults with roulette wheels.

Second, the banks wanted the right to play a new high-risk game: “derivatives trading.” … Deputy Treasury Secretary Summers (soon to replace Rubin as Secretary) body-blocked any attempt to control derivatives.

But what was the use of turning U.S. banks into derivatives casinos if money would flee to nations with safer banking laws?

The answer conceived by the Big Bank Five: eliminate controls on banks in every nation on the planet – in one single move.… The bankers’ and Summers’ game was to use the Financial Services Agreement, an abstruse and benign addendum to the international trade agreements policed by the World Trade Organization.

… The new rules of the game would force every nation to open their markets to Citibank, JP Morgan and their derivatives “products.”

[…]

The WTO Financial Services Agreement became the battering ram for opening global markets to this derivative play. Every member nation was forced to open its banking system or face sanctions. In 1999, the portion of Glass-Steagall separating investment banking from depository banking in the U.S. was repealed, leaving depositors’ money vulnerable to speculative risk. Derivatives then exploded. Sovereign bonds, oil contracts, shipping insurance policies, and war-risk premiums were all sliced into credit-default swaps, hedges, and other derivative products.

Derivatives trading has since become one of the most concentrated and profitable businesses on the planet, and it is almost entirely controlled by a handful of megabanks. According to data from the Bank for International Settlements and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the top five U.S. banks alone hold roughly 90% of all U.S. bank derivatives, with JPMorgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley dominating the global over-the-counter market. These institutions capture the lion’s share of derivative profits, especially during periods of volatility when the “chaos premium” spikes.

“The Great Taking” — the Legal Trap Granting Derivatives Super-Priority in Bankruptcy 

In The Great Taking, David Rogers Webb lays bare the final piece in this financial control grid: virtually every security today is dematerialized (digitized) and pooled in central depositories. Quiet changes to the Uniform Commercial Code and equivalent E.U. rules have turned ordinary investors into mere “entitlement holders” holding only a legal claim against their brokerages.

As for bank depositors, they have for centuries been categorized as mere “creditors” of their banks. Once the money is deposited, legal title passes to the bank. The depositor holds only a contractual claim (a demand liability) that ranks as an unsecured creditor position in the event of insolvency.

In any insolvency, stocks, bonds, and deposits are legally collateral for the derivatives complex — collateral that has been rehypothecated multiple times over. And when the derivative collateral fails, the rehypothecated house of cards that has been built on it collapses. Margin calls cascade, super-priority is triggered, and the Great Taking begins. (For more on this quite complicated subject, see Webb’s book and my earlier article here.)

Iran’s Interest-Free Islamic Banking: The Structural Obstacle

So what did it matter if Iran and a handful of other countries declined to join in this lucrative bankers’ game? The risk was that when depositors and shareholders realized that they did not actually own their funds, they would move their assets to those safe zones. The holdout countries were also safe from the sort of sanctions imposed by Western governments (and enforced by Western banks and clearing houses) on Russian central bank assets after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. 

Leading this band of holdouts was Iran, which since its 1983 Law for Usury-Free Banking Operations has run the world’s only fully interest-free (riba-free) banking regime. Its banks use Sharia-compliant contracts — profit-sharing (musharakah), cost-plus financing (murabaha), and leasing (ijara) — instead of charging or paying interest.

[…]

Iran’s system was designed to eliminate usury and align finance with real economic activity and risk-sharing rather than speculative debt.

[…]

By rejecting interest at the national level, Iran has thus insulated itself and its financial partners from the control grid that has made the global “Great Taking” possible.

The Insurance Chaos Has Softened but the “Black Swan” Still Hovers 

The Strait of Hormuz is not fully closed, but traffic remains severely reduced under Iran’s selective, permission-based transit regime. Only vessels from “friendly” or non-hostile nations are being cleared after prior coordination with Iranian authorities. Significant backlogs persist, with more than 1,000 vessels reported waiting or diverted and over 34,000 shipping routes rerouted in the first four weeks of disruption.

President Trump’s $20 billion reinsurance facility announced on March 6 is now operational and has been doubled to $40 billion. Additional major U.S. insurers have joined, while Lloyd’s of London has engaged in related discussions. The facility remains centered on American carriers with U.S. government backing. But analysts doubt it will restart widespread commercial traffic without broader liability protection and safer conditions.

[…]

Conclusions and Resolutions

The 2007-08 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) is now widely regarded as having been triggered by the unchecked explosion of unregulated derivatives — especially credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations — which turned subprime mortgages into a systemic time bomb. The damage was not confined to the United States: developing countries suffered heavily as well.

Today the risk of a crash is even greater than during the GFC. The global OTC derivatives market has officially ballooned to a notional value of $846 trillion, more than seven times the size of the entire world economy.

[…]

Via https://www.globalresearch.ca/all-wars-bankers-wars-iran/5922072

The Congo as a Site of Capital Accumulation: Erik Prince and the Privatization of War

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Erik PrinceErik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). © Zach D Roberts / NurPhoto via AFP
Kribsoo Diallo
14 Oct 2026

Erik Prince’s mercenary operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo serve U.S. imperial and corporate interests in critical minerals and violate the Congolese peoples’ sovereignty.

A lot of news has circulated across various global media platforms following reports that militias affiliated with Erik Prince—the U.S. billionaire and founder of the infamous military contractor Blackwater, which has a track record of abuses and killings in several Global South countries—suffered significant field losses in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. This followed an ambush that resulted in the death and injury of at least 20 people, including Tim Kennedy, a famous UFC athlete and former US Army Special Forces soldier.

Erik Prince is a U.S. businessman and former US Navy SEAL who founded Blackwater in 1997, transforming it into one of the world’s most notorious military mercenary companies. He capitalized on the U.S. military’s growing reliance on private military and security firms to provide paid combat and security services. Educated at Hillsdale College, a conservative religious institution, he later served in the US Navy SEALs. His career illustrates the intersection of private capitalist interests and U.S. military expansion, where wars and military interventions become profit-making ventures. After selling Blackwater in 2010, Prince continued his operations through other companies and networks, including Frontier Services Group, which expanded into providing logistical and security services for commercial and mining projects in Africa. In recent years, he branched out through Vectus Global, whose activities in the DRC expanded from collecting mineral resource revenues to providing operational support to the Congolese army.

Under President Felix Tshisekedi, a documented attempt to enlist foreign military contractors (mercenaries) dates back to 2023. At the time, the Rwanda-backed M23 militia was making field advances in North Kivu province, and the government was looking for ways to bolster its military capabilities and secure mining areas in the east. In this context, a plan was revived to bring in about 2,500 military contractors from Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina to halt the rebel advance and secure mineral-rich regions. Preparations included establishing barracks in Mubambiro, near Sake and adjacent to a Congo Protection training camp, to host the first batch in late July 2023. Containers of equipment arrived at the site that same month. Erik Prince spearheaded the negotiations to deploy these foreign contractors, part of a plan heavily promoted by Kahumbu Bula Mandungu, known as “Kao,” an advisor to President Tshisekedi, amid reports linking the scheme to arrangements between Kinshasa and Abu Dhabi. Ultimately, the project stalled, and the Latin American contractors never arrived in the DRC.

Prince returned to the Congolese scene through a seemingly different avenue in late 2024, striking an agreement with the Congolese government to improve public revenue collection from the mining sector and combat mineral smuggling in copper- and cobalt-rich areas. The government signed a five-year deal with Prince through a network of commercial shell entities. In June 2025, Quantum Global Consulting, a UAE-based firm linked to Prince, registered a subsidiary in the DRC, Quantum Global Consulting Africa, to act as its legal representative. This subsidiary then registered Vectus Global as a local legal entity. The contract with the Congolese Ministry of Finance included a financial mandate to increase government revenues from extractive industries while curbing smuggling, corruption, and tax evasion. However, it also contained a secret military component: advising the Congolese Armed Forces, providing aerial capabilities, and recruiting foreign military personnel. The contract was valued at approximately $700 million over five years.

The initial plan involved dispatching about 100 advisors and technical experts to monitor mining operations and revenues, starting with major mines before gradually expanding. The goal was to improve the oversight of production and exports and ensure compliance with the Congolese mining code. The priority was the Katanga region, particularly around the city of Kolwezi, the hub of the copper and cobalt industry. This area was far from the main combat zones where the M23 militia operated in North Kivu.

A major turning point occurred in late 2025 and early 2026 as the war in eastern Congo escalated, spreading to strategic areas in South Kivu. This was especially pronounced after the M23 militia seized Uvira, a key city on the Burundian border along the shores of Lake Tanganyika. This posed a severe threat to the Kinshasa government. In response, Erik Prince, through Vectus Global, deployed a team to support the Congolese army in the region. The mission involved operating drones and providing operational support to government forces, marking the first known participation of Prince’s forces in frontline combat operations within the DRC.

The military activity of foreign contractors in Congo was not limited to Americans. Israeli military advisors worked in coordination with Prince, participating in training two Congolese Special Forces battalions for day and night operations. Contractors from El Salvador, mostly former military and police personnel, were also recruited. A July 2026 report by the Critical Threats Project noted that in April of that year, the Congolese government announced the UAE’s commitment to help fund the training of a paramilitary force exceeding 20,000 personnel, ostensibly to protect mines in the south. Two months earlier, the UAE had dispatched a government and trade delegation to Lualaba province, holding meetings in Kolwezi with officials from the mining, energy, and infrastructure sectors, culminating in the announcement of 16 memorandums of understanding across multiple fields.

Prince is a staunch supporter of Donald Trump, and his company’s activities in Congo intersect closely with Washington’s economic and security objectives. His forces were deployed at a time when the Trump administration sought to link economic and security cooperation with Kinshasa to securing broader access for American companies in the critical minerals sector. This was framed as an effort to counter Chinese influence, rather than a genuine push to defeat M23 or contain the ambitions of Rwandan President Paul Kagame. On March 2, 2026, the US Treasury Department sanctioned the Rwandan Defense Forces and four of its senior officials. On June 25 of the same year, it sanctioned a Rwandan gold refinery and a network accused of smuggling minerals from Congolese territory controlled by M23. Yet, these measures failed to dismantle the smuggling networks, resolve the conflict, stop the militia’s atrocities, or cut off the crucial Rwandan support driving M23’s expansion. A March 8, 2026, Washington Post investigation cited a US official stating that Paul Kagame successfully delayed the sanctions for several months by reaching out to Senator Lindsey Graham, who intervened with the White House. The report noted that Graham served as an advisor to Trump—a detail previously highlighted by the Wall Street Journal—illustrating the limits of American pressure. According to the official’s account, these high-level political channels allowed Kagame to buy time.

The US-Congolese agreement established a mechanism called the Strategic Asset Reserve. Under this framework, American investors receive the right of first refusal on listed projects and preferential access to specific investment opportunities in the Congolese resource sector. In April 2026, Reuters published an investigation detailing how Virtus Minerals, an American company, acquired Chemaf’s mining assets for $30 million. In February 2026, a proposed deal emerged to sell a 40% stake in the Mutanda and Kamoto Copper Company mines to the Orion Critical Mineral Consortium, backed by the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and the UAE’s ADQ fund. These deals positioned American and Emirati investors prominently within Congolese copper and cobalt assets. The clearest indicator of US objectives is the Lobito Corridor project, which links mining zones in Congo and Zambia to the Atlantic port of Lobito via Angola. The US supports this project through development financing and infrastructure investments, aiming to create an alternative export route for Congolese copper and cobalt to Western markets, bypassing trade networks linked to East and Southern Africa or those dominated by Chinese firms.

Erik Prince and his state backers are not the saviors the Congolese people are waiting for to end militia violence and Rwandan interference. The man the Congolese government has hired for security and military services is neither a neutral mediator nor someone operating outside the very interests that fuel and profit from these conflicts. He is a criminal who embodies the nexus between capitalist economic interests, the privatization of warfare, and the defense of US imperial hegemony. This is not just an assumption; in an episode of his podcast Off Leash, Prince explicitly called for the US to resume a direct imperial role, stating it was time to “put the imperial hat back on” and govern countries he claimed are incapable of governing themselves. He made sweeping racist generalizations about Africa, asserting that most of its nations cannot manage their own affairs. When his co-host, Mark Serrano, pointed out that this sounded like a call for a return to colonialism, Prince replied bluntly: “Absolutely, yes!”

[…]

Via https://www.blackagendareport.com/congo-site-capital-accumulation-erik-prince-and-privatization-war

Four in five new UK jobs taken by foreigners

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Four in five new UK jobs taken by foreigners – report
FILE PHOTO. © Getty Images / Oli Scarff / Staff

Published 14 Oct, 2026 

Successive governments have turned to migrant labor while millions of Britons are on welfare, a think tank finds

Foreign nationals have filled 80% of new UK jobs over the past decade, while millions of Britons have remained on out-of-work benefits, according to a new report by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ).

The UK think tank said on Tuesday that British nationals accounted for just 734,000 of the 3.7 million jobs added to payrolls between 2014 and the end of 2025. EU nationals accounted for 408,000 new jobs, while migrants from the rest of the world filled around 2.5 million.

“Employers have gained unprecedented access to overseas labour while taxpayers have absorbed the growing cost of domestic worklessness,” the report said.

The findings are part of a major inquiry chaired by former UK Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith. The report argues that successive governments have relied on low-skilled migrant labor while millions of Britons have been “written off” by the welfare system.

Since 2020, payroll employment among non-EU nationals has surged by 2.1 million, while the number of people claiming out-of-work benefits has risen by 2.3 million. Much of the employment growth was concentrated in health and social care, administrative services, hospitality and retail.

“Compounding this, ministers have repeatedly pulled the easy lever of immigration rather than providing a better deal for left behind communities,” Duncan Smith said, urging coordinated reforms to welfare, immigration and regional development.

Around 6.7 million people in England, Wales and Scotland now receive at least one out-of-work benefit, equivalent to roughly one in six working-age adults, according to the CSJ. Since 2019, the number of claimants exempt from requirements to seek or prepare for work has climbed by nearly 1.7 million.

Annual spending on working-age benefits is projected to reach £136.1 billion ($181 billion) in 2026-27.

The report comes amid mounting political pressure over immigration. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has repeatedly accused successive governments of favoring migrants and minorities over the white working class, demanding tighter border controls and denouncing what he calls a “two-tier” system of unequal treatment.

Britain has also struggled to stop illegal crossings of the English Channel. Some 33,374 people arrived in small boats in the year ending June 2026, down 23% from the previous year, according to the Home Office. The crossings accounted for 88% of detected arrivals via illegal routes.

Public concern remains widespread. An August YouGov poll found that 69% of Britons believed immigration over the previous decade has been too high, while 43% considered it mostly bad for the country, up from 33% in 2016.
[…]

Israeli criminal networks using drones and balloons to smuggle drugs into Jordan

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The Cradle

Israeli criminal networks are using drones and balloons to smuggle narcotics into Jordan, exploiting rising prices in the kingdom, according to a report published by The Telegraph on Tuesday.

The newspaper cited officials who said quadcopter drones were being used to transport crystal meth, amphetamines and hashish across the border, while photographs from military sources showed balloons being used in smuggling operations.

Jordanian military sources told The Telegraph that Israeli announcements about weapons-smuggling attempts from Jordan present a selective picture of cross-border activity while overlooking drug trafficking into the kingdom. One source said Jordanian border guards had thwarted several attempts to smuggle narcotics from Israel in recent months.

Figures reviewed by The Telegraph indicate that Jordanian forces have intercepted more than 15,000 Captagon pills, nearly 20,000 kilograms of crystal meth and 6,000 blocks of hashish since the beginning of 2026, alongside other narcotics.

Via https://t.me/thecradlemedia/69396

UN official sounds alarm as Hormuz fertilizer deadlock pushes Asia, Africa toward food crisis

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(Photo credit: TIMES)

 

OCT 14, 2026

The Cradle

A UN official says the planting season will be lost unless Washington and Tehran strike a deal within weeks

 A senior UN official warned on 14 October that a failure by the US and Iran to quickly approve a UN plan for shipping fertilizer through the Strait of Hormuz could plunge parts of Asia and Africa into a food security crisis, Reuters reported.

“It’s absolutely crucial to get the deal in the next few weeks. Otherwise, we will miss the planting season,” UN Under-Secretary-General Jorge Moreira da Silva told the agency in Bangkok, on the sidelines of the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

The UN formed a task force in March to secure passage for fertilizer through the strait, but its mechanism has never been put into operation.

Under the plan, a coordination center in Oman would register ships and arrange their transit, while UN monitors would work with local authorities at Gulf ports to verify what is loaded on board.

Da Silva said allowing just five vessels through Hormuz each day could sustain fertilizer deliveries to the countries that need them most.

“We need seven days to put the monitors on the ground and to ensure the transit of fertilizers … We are ready, but we are still dependent on the political will of the parties,” he told the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs in Brussels.

The proposal has broad support among UN member states but still lacks a mandate from Washington and Tehran, he said.

According to UN analysis he cited, daily traffic through the strait has collapsed from around 130 ships before the war to just five last week. He added that fertilizer prices have jumped 25 to 30 percent since late February.

Moreira da Silva said the World Food Programme (WFP) estimates the disruptions could leave some 45 million people facing acute food shortages.

He said Sudan, Somalia, Mozambique, and Tanzania rely on the Gulf for 50 to 60 percent of their fertilizer.

Via https://thecradle.co/articles/un-official-sounds-alarm-as-hormuz-fertilizer-deadlock-pushes-asia-africa-toward-food-crisis