Zero Hedge

Critical Part Of Hungary & Slovakia's Russian Oil Flows Has Just Been Blown Up

Critical Part Of Hungary & Slovakia's Russian Oil Flows Has Just Been Blown Up

Ukraine's long-range drone campaign has reportedly once again struck at the heart of Russia's energy artery, igniting a fire at a key Transneft oil pumping station in the republic of Tatarstan early Monday.

Regional officials confirmed the incident after local media and Telegram channels first reported explosions near the strategic facility, with authorities announcing: "as a result of falling drone debris, a local fire broke out in an industrial zone."

Source: Moscow Times/@exilenova_plus

No casualties resulted from the blasts which took place around 4am at the Kaleykino pumping station. A fire ensued after eyewitnesses reported hearing some seven explosions.

Ukrainian media has cited a source who described, "Tonight, long-range SBU drones caused a 'bavovna' (explosion) at the main oil pumping station 'Kaleykino' near Almetyevsk in Tatarstan. It receives oil from Western Siberia and the Volga region and mixes it before sending it for export. The station is a key hub for supplying raw materials to the 'Druzhba' oil pipeline."

The Moscow Times also notes: 

Kaleykino serves as a critical receiving and mixing terminal that aggregates crude oil flows from several Russian regions and facilitates the transport of nearly 30% of the country’s crude oil toward major export routes like the Druzhba pipeline.

Druzhba has been featured heavily in the news of late, given oil shipments to Hungary and Slovakia via Druzhba were halted after a Jan. 27 airstrike on equipment in western Ukraine.

Ukraine blamed the attack on Moscow, while Hungary is blaming Kiev for deliberately not repairing the pipeline because it doesn't want it to supply Budapest, or Slovakia, with Russian oil. A political firestorm has ensued ever since.

The controversy has led the Orban government to on Monday block the EU's proposed €90 billion loan package for Ukraine and also it vetoed the 20th round of anti-Moscow sanctions.

Interesting timing, to say the least...

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has been very open about its cross-border aims regarding attacks on Russian energy, with a Ukrainian SBU official boasting as follows: 

"The SBU is systematically working to cut down on the extraction and transportation of Russian oil. Our special operations are methodically reducing the filling of the Russian budget with petrodollars, which finance the war against Ukraine. This work will continue to exhaust and gradually bleed the Russian economy."

At the same time, Hungary and Slovakia's stances as disrupters of EU policy have been a big 'win' for Moscow.

Tyler Durden Tue, 02/24/2026 - 04:15

These Are The World's 10 Deadliest Viruses

These Are The World's 10 Deadliest Viruses

Some viruses infect millions but kill relatively few. Others spread less widely yet prove far more lethal once contracted.

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist's Bruno Venditti, ranks 10 of the world’s deadliest viruses by case fatality rate: the percentage of infected people who die from the disease.

Rabies tops the list, with a fatality rate approaching 100% once symptoms appear.

The data for this visualization comes from various sources such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the BC Centre for Disease Control, the Australian Government, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Reuters, and the UK Government.

Rabies: Almost Universally Fatal

The virus kills an estimated 59,000 people per year, primarily in Africa and Southeast Asia. The virus spreads primarily through the saliva of infected animals, especially dogs.

Despite being vaccine-preventable, rabies still causes thousands of deaths, mainly in Africa and Southeast Asia. Limited access to post-exposure treatment is a key reason for its continued toll.

Hemorrhagic Fevers: Ebola, Marburg, and CCHF

Several of the viruses on the list cause viral hemorrhagic fevers, including Ebola, Marburg, and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF). These diseases often lead to severe internal bleeding and organ failure.

Ebola and Marburg both have fatality rates around 50%, with outbreaks concentrated in Central and Sub-Saharan Africa. The 2014–2016 West Africa Ebola outbreak alone killed over 11,000 people and brought global attention to epidemic preparedness.

CCHF, transmitted primarily through ticks and livestock, is more geographically widespread across Eurasia and Africa. While its fatality rate ranges from 10–40%, it causes an estimated 1,000–2,000 deaths annually.

Zoonotic Spillover: From Bats to Camels

Most of the viruses ranked here originate in animals. Fruit bats are linked to Nipah and Marburg viruses, while rodents are associated with Lujo virus. Camels are the primary reservoir for MERS-CoV, first identified in Saudi Arabia in 2012.

Avian influenza (H5N1) spreads from infected birds and has a roughly 50% fatality rate among confirmed human cases—far higher than seasonal flu. Although human infections remain relatively rare, the high case fatality rate has kept global health authorities on alert.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out Countries With the Biggest Gains in Life Expectancy on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist.

Tyler Durden Tue, 02/24/2026 - 02:45

Despite Deportation Order Dating Back 23 Years, Bosnian Criminal Migrant Gets €7,250 Every Month In Welfare From German Taxpayers

Despite Deportation Order Dating Back 23 Years, Bosnian Criminal Migrant Gets €7,250 Every Month In Welfare From German Taxpayers

Via Remix News,

A Bosnian national, identified as Huso B., is being labeled one of the worst cases of a foreigner taking advantage of Germany’s generous welfare system.

The man, who has numerous criminal offenses on his record, remains in Germany despite being under a mandatory order to leave the country for 23 years.

Remarkably, the German justice system failed to find him and “suspended” criminal proceedings against him, while Bild newspaper then went on to find him with ease.

Despite Huso B. overstaying his welcome by decades, the state provides him €7250.77 every month to support his wife and eight children.

The bureaucratic confusion reached a new peak last December. When the Cologne District Court attempted to try B. on fraud charges, officials claimed he could not be located—despite his address being documented by the City of Cologne and the city’s job center. However, reporters from Bild newspaper were able to find him almost immediately.

On Dec. 8, 2025, Huso B. was scheduled to appear before the Cologne District Court. He faces allegations of defrauding a drugstore chain out of a four-figure sum across three separate instances. However, the trial was derailed because the court’s formal summons was reportedly never served at his asylum seeker accommodation.

According to officials, the postman was unable to deliver the documents to B. personally or leave them in a mailbox. Because the court was “thus unable to load him,“ the trial date was scrapped, and the legal proceedings were suspended.

Bild, however, appears to have embarrassed the city government and the German legal system.

The paper sent a reporter directly to the asylum seeker’s home in southern Cologne.

There, without much work, they found his mailbox with his name clearly listed.

Not only that, but once the reporters arrived, they found Huso B. in person.

He spoke to the reporters, telling them that he does not have any legal troubles and the last time he was investigated was back in 2014.

Bild’s efforts did not go to waste.

Once Bild revealed the incompetence of German authorities, they are now responding

“He is currently being searched for. However, there is no arrest warrant against him. That would be disproportionate given the allegations made,“ Cologne’s senior public prosecutor Ulrich Bremer told Bild.

“However, we will now use the Bild research as an opportunity to check again whether he can be found at the address.“

Bild further highlighted the absurd situation in the Cologne justice system. While the police and justices said Huso B. could not be found, the social welfare office was continuing to send him money.

He and his family receive €87,000 a year under the Asylum Seekers Benefit Act, which includes “support for living expenses.”

In addition, the family lives rent-free in a state-provided home. When reviewing documents from the Job Center, the press confirmed that the proper address is on file and that the welfare office authorities had this information the entire time.

Read more here...

Tyler Durden Tue, 02/24/2026 - 02:00

Escobar: The Discombobulated West

Escobar: The Discombobulated West

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

Neo-Caligula – a.k.a. The Undisputed Tariff Champion of the World – seems to be surprised that Iran has not capitulated.

No wonder. No clueless sycophant amongst his astonishingly mediocre inner circle is intellectually equipped to explain to neo-Caligula, in soundbites, the basics of Shi’ism.

It gets worse.

What’s actually on the imperial table is the return of Total War as a political cover up, benefitting a sizable chunk of the massively corrupt/perverse Anglo-American/Atlanticist oligarchy.

The Geneva “negotiations” have been a failure. War on Russia was the leitmotif of the Munich Security Conference. The “massive armada” concentrated not far from the Persian Gulf walks, talks and sails like the US/Israel is ready to attack Iran.

Even considering a possible last chance saloon in Geneva on Friday; even considering no Iranian capitulation, the most plausible scenario remains TACO.

Because an attack on Iran – leading to a devastating response – seals the deal on the Republicans losing the mid-terms, and neo-Caligula becoming a lame tariffed duck.

All the drama revolves around the immediate imperative of switching attention from the Epstein Files – or The United States of Epstein Island colliding with the Western Epstein Collective. The Trump-Bibi-Epstein Syndicate needs to change the narrative.

In the US, a monster speculative bubble rules; historically, the Empire of Chaos, Plunder and Permanent Strikes always go to war after a bubble explodes. The Department of Forever Wars will have a budget 50% higher in 2027.

Yet the wars must start now. The industrial-military complex, or rather the MICIMATT, as memorably defined by Ray McGovern (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex) is the only escape valve for a Western turbo-capitalism trailing economically and with its “credibility” six feet under.

The new paradigm – no rules whatsoever international chaos – is now naked. It’s supremely, pornographically predatory: the Epstein ethos captures it to perfection.

And History does repeat itself – always as farce: the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine will go on. That’s an European “elite” obsession. And just like in 1941, it’s over Russia’s immense natural resources.

So Nietzsche was right, as usual, as early as in 1888. We are living the death pangs of the Western, post-modernist plunge into nihilism. Post-truth, in yet another poetic (in)justice nugget, is mirrored by Truth Social.

Discombobulate me, baby

Our current deep, dark malaise could easily be analyzed as the logical conclusion of a long process encompassing the Persian empire, the Greco-Persian wars, their impact on Greek culture, Hellenism, the Roman empire, the emergence of Christianity and Islam, the Crusades, the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery surpassing intra-Eurasian trade, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, the American independence, the French revolution, German idealism, the revolutions of 1848, Nietzsche, WWI and WW2.

Over two millennia, Plato and Aristotle provided the philosophical architecture for this tradition. Then, already in 1945, the whole edifice broke down. Liberal capitalism and American “democracy” imposed themselves as uncontestable truths – and terminated the space for substantive ideological debate.

The end of the USSR gave birth to the supreme silliness of the “end of History” – and thus the end of critical thinking. Only now, with the rise and rise of China, the West is being forced to return to History, of which from now on it will be mostly a spectator. The collective, fragmented West has lost for good the capacity to localize itself historically. The West is now under total Discombobulator domination.

Discombobulator logic applies, for instance, to the EU’s energy suicide. The Ohio‑based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) recently estimated that the US may come up with up to 80% of the EU’s LNG imports by 2030. That links to the trade deal announced last July committing the EU to buy a humongous $750 billion in US energy products by 2028.

Losing cheap Russian gas and depending on ridiculously expensive LNG from the Empire of Chaos is the death knell of industrial enterprise EU-wide. Shutdowns and bankruptcies are already the norm, especially in the former industrial powerhouse Germany. Call it the Triumph of De-Industrialization.

Meanwhile, rational RIC (Russia-India-China) actors invest in a complex strategic build up.

Cue to a conjunction of Russia’s clever tactical engagement, a promise used as leverage, with some US dollar domains; the steady expansion of the internationalized yuan; India also leveraging US relations while advancing the BRICS payment system architecture; and interconnected maritime security, as in Russia-China-Iran naval drills.

The US National Security Strategy’s design of five spheres of influence is already floundering: US, Russia, China (both designated as enemies), India and Japan (a US vassal).

The NSS insists that “the security, freedom and prosperity of the American people is directly linked to our capacity of trading and being implicated in a position of force in the Indo-Pacific.”

So in fact this is a threat of war, not a geoeconomic offer. Even India can see that. Something totally in synch with the foremost, desperate imperial need for natural resources and control of strategic territories.

The ultimate showdown

The New Great Game evolves, but the key battleground is set: US-China. Everything else is subordinated to it. Neo-Caligula is set to visit China in early April. Talk about the ultimate showdown.

Neo-Caligula will try, under pressure, to secure some sort of grand bargain to secure US dollar dominance. Major fail guaranteed – as the Empire of Chaos still seeks to coerce China when it badly needs its cooperation.

What really matters to Beijing is to internationalize the yuan while building gold-backed corridor after corridor. And using its financial firepower with discretion – be it by restricting silver exports or dumping US treasuries.

Beijing knows all too well that the stack of all-American bubbles can only be sustained by iron-clad oligarchic control and endless money printing. There’s no Plan B.

We have already entered a new historical phase: no holds barred; no periphrasis; not even an attempt to justify anything.

That applies, for instance, to piracy by the Americans – and to a certain extent the Europeans – on Russian naval assets.

Iran mirrors the ultimate showdown: either US-Zionist imperialism prevails, or it’s multipolarity – as represented by the Russia-China strategic partnership and BRICS.

So it’s no wonder that the omnipresent battlefield is bound to get more ferocious day after day.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Mon, 02/23/2026 - 23:25

Is Privacy Entirely Gone?

Is Privacy Entirely Gone?

Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

If you watch any movie from the 1940s in the film noir genre, you will see a recurring theme. Someone does something bad but runs away to another state. He might put on a disguise. People try to find him but cannot. He checks in and out of hotels under an assumed name. The heroic detective works to put together clues to connect the dots.

Urban Tech Imagery/Shutterstock

So on it goes in many variations of this theme, all of which turn on technological limitations. The police did not have the data. Communications technology was limited to phones attached to walls. There was no national database of anything, no permanent records except paper with fading ink in deep storage.

Nearly every drama turns on this point. A man courts a beautiful woman of noble lineage only to find out later that she is really a tramp on the make. A woman loves a man who she thinks is a fine gentleman only to discover later that he is an indebted rake. The priest is actually a mobster, a mobster is really a policeman, a shopkeeper is really a spy, and so on.

It’s all about information asymmetry. A vast gulf separates what is known by the players who are making decisions based on knowledge flows. Trickery is easy, deception is not easily discovered, duplicity is rewarded, and all-around sneakiness becomes the desiderata of social functioning. This dark plot line was especially compelling during and after World War II.

Watching this now, it’s impossible not to notice the difference between then and now. Almost everyone has a huge social media timeline that is open to the public. Artificial intelligence can figure out the most important details about anyone. What was once private is now entirely out in the open. What’s more remarkable still is that this new world without privacy was built entirely with public cooperation.

You watch old movies now and want to yell at the confused cop: Why not just take a look at the suspect’s social media trail? Of course, no such thing existed at the time. Now it does, which certainly makes law enforcement easier. That’s good. On the other hand, there is no longer much chance for anyone to maintain any privacy at all. That’s bad.

It’s much worse than that, as you know. Your every mouse click and phone scroll is recorded on databases that grow ever larger in size. These are sold and sold again, to other companies and also to governments. There is no limit on this. Your life has become your data, and your data belong to everyone. It’s the panopticon courtesy of technological innovation without guardrails.

Years ago, when email first came along, I intuited that there was nothing private about it ever. Anyone can forward anything to anyone. Storage allows something you sent a decade ago to resurface and be posted in public. Everything you say might as well be on a billboard on the interstate highway. This is just the nature of the medium.

Sadly, it took most people about 10 years to figure this out. What applies to email also applies to chats and groups. Screenshots enable anyone to share anything and everything you have ever said. Only recently have some options appeared that block screenshots, but I’m sure there is some way around that.

The world of yesteryear, the world of information asymmetry that formed the main plot device of novels and movies for centuries, is entirely gone.

The release of these Epstein files is a case in point. They reveal a terrible world of influence-peddling and grim debauchery. At the same time, many innocent people have likely been caught up in it. If you knew this guy and communicated with him at all, you are now under suspicion for having dark secrets, whether you do or not.

To be sure, much of the release of this information that implicates the overclass has been gathered by court discovery and the release then forced by an act of Congress. That said, it should serve as a reminder to everyone that what you do on your computer could potentially go public under the right circumstances. Anyone can be sued for anything, and if court discovery kicks in, nothing is private.

As a result, the release of these files is satisfying on the one hand but alarming on the other. Yes, we all want justice to come to bad actors, even if it comes in the form of a loss of reputation. On the other hand, innocent people who merely sent polite texts and emails are being dragged along too, creating all sorts of voyeuristic suspicions that are likely unjustified.

And yet perhaps this is a warning to everyone. Nothing you do on social media is private, obviously. But the same goes for emails, chats, texts, and even proprietary business communications. It’s also become obvious that our home devices and phones are always listening to our conversations. You should have it happen that you are talking about any subject with a friend only to have related ads hit your phone an hour later.

The only way to be truly private in conversation anymore is to be in person and without your smartphones. I hate being paranoid this way, much less forcing people to leave cellphones in the car if they are in my home or at dinner, but I fully understand why people do this. It’s not that we are hiding something; it’s simply that we don’t think the entire world should be listening to every passing word or typed message.

The deeper tragedy is the chilling effect. People self-censor, avoid controversial topics, or hesitate to associate with certain individuals lest old messages resurface. Innovation suffers when risk-averse cultures dominate. Free inquiry withers under perpetual surveillance. Trust erodes in institutions and in each other.

Reclaiming some privacy demands individual vigilance. As much as I would like to think legislation could help, I seriously doubt it. What we need is a culture-wide rejection of unchecked data extraction, stronger guardrails against commercial and state overreach, and decentralized technologies that prioritize user sovereignty over corporate control.

Until then, the old noir plots—where deception thrives on hidden truths—seem quaint. Today, the truth is everywhere, weaponized, inescapable, and often wielded against the wrong people. In this new reality, privacy isn’t entirely dead. It’s just increasingly expensive, inconvenient, and rare.

As frustrating as the old world of not knowing truly was, the new world of knowing everything about everybody has made us all nostalgic for the old movies. Our technological systems built to solve one big problem have created countless others of which we now know plus many more that will be revealed in the course of time.

Tyler Durden Mon, 02/23/2026 - 22:35

Who Believes In Aliens, Bigfoot, & The Chupacabra?

Who Believes In Aliens, Bigfoot, & The Chupacabra?

Belief in the unknown, whether extraterrestrials or legendary creatures, remains surprisingly common in America.

The visualization below, created by Visual Capitalist's Julie Peasley using data from YouGov, explores how likely U.S. adults think it is that aliens, Bigfoot, and the chupacabra exist.

Here’s how Americans responded when asked how likely each being exists, according to YouGov:

Aliens clearly stand apart. A majority (56%) say extraterrestrials definitely or probably exist, more than double the share who believe in Bigfoot, and more than triple belief in the chupacabra.

Aliens: From Fringe to Mainstream?

Interest in extraterrestrial life has grown steadily, fueled by government disclosures and increased reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs).

According to YouGov, 56% of Americans say aliens definitely (18%) or probably (38%) exist. That makes extraterrestrials far more plausible in the public mind than either Bigfoot or the chupacabra.

YouGov’s polling also finds that roughly half of Americans believe aliens have visited Earth. In addition, about one-third say UFO sightings are evidence of alien spacecraft, while others attribute them to natural phenomena, secret military technology, or optical illusions.

Demographic differences are notable. Younger Americans are generally more likely to believe in extraterrestrials than older cohorts, and men tend to express higher levels of belief than women.

Taken together, the data suggests that belief in aliens has moved well beyond the fringe. While skepticism remains, the idea that intelligent life exists somewhere beyond Earth is now a mainstream view in the United States.

Globally, belief varies widely. We previously mapped the countries that believe in aliens the most, showing that views differ significantly across regions and cultures.

Bigfoot: America’s Favorite Cryptid

Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch, is a legendary ape-like creature said to inhabit forests in North America.

While 28% of Americans say Bigfoot probably or definitely exists, a larger share (60%) say it probably or definitely does not. Compared to aliens, belief in Bigfoot is far more polarized, with fewer “not sure” responses.

Despite the skepticism, Bigfoot remains deeply embedded in pop culture, particularly in the Pacific Northwest.

What Is the Chupacabra?

The chupacabra, which translates to “goat sucker” in Spanish, is a cryptid said to attack livestock, particularly in Latin America and the southern United States.

Only 16% of Americans believe it exists, while 60% say it likely or definitely does not. Notably, nearly a quarter (24%) say they are not sure, which is a higher uncertainty than for aliens or Bigfoot. This suggests that while the chupacabra is less widely believed, it remains a mysterious figure in American folklore.

Curious how beliefs in extraterrestrials connect to UFO sightings? Explore One Third of Americans Believe UFO Sightings are Aliens on the Voronoi app for more data-driven insights into what Americans think about life beyond Earth.

Tyler Durden Mon, 02/23/2026 - 22:10

Necessary Evil: RFK Jr. Defends Trump's Glyphosate Order

Necessary Evil: RFK Jr. Defends Trump's Glyphosate Order

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Feb. 22 said that glyphosate is poisonous but necessary as he backed President Donald Trump’s recent order designating the production of the herbicide as critical to national security.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (L) speaks at the White House on Jan. 29, 2026. Samuel Corum/Getty Images

In a lengthy post on social media, Kennedy said that pesticides and herbicides are toxic.

“When we apply them across millions of acres and allow them into our food system, we put Americans at risk. Chemical manufacturers have paid tens of billions of dollars to settle cancer claims linked to their products, and many agricultural communities report elevated cancer rates and chronic disease,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, our agricultural system depends heavily on these chemicals.”

If the United States stopped using the products, then “crop yields would fall, food prices would surge, and America would experience a massive loss of farms even beyond what we are witnessing today,” Kennedy said.

The health secretary described Trump’s order as protecting national defense and the nation’s food supply, stating that Trump inherited the current agricultural system and that his administration is shifting from it without destabilizing the food supply.

“We are accelerating the transition to regenerative agriculture by expanding farming systems that rebuild soil, increase biodiversity, improve water retention, and reduce reliance on synthetic chemicals, including pre-harvest desiccation. We are also driving the rapid adoption of next-generation technologies, including laser-guided weed control, electrothermal and electrical systems, robotics, precision mechanical cultivation, and biological controls that replace blanket spraying with precision intervention,” Kennedy wrote.

“These solutions are not theoretical. Farmers are already putting them to work. Markets are scaling them. Now the federal government will act with urgency to expand their reach and accelerate adoption nationwide.”

Kennedy added later: “The Make America Healthy Again agenda forces us to challenge long-standing assumptions about how we grow food, structure markets, and measure success in this country. Reform at this scale will test entrenched interests, and it will not move in a straight line.”

In his Feb. 18 order, Trump said herbicides with glyphosate are widely used in the United States and enable farmers to achieve high yields and low production costs.

“There is no direct one-for-one chemical alternative to glyphosate-based herbicides. Lack of access to glyphosate-based herbicides would critically jeopardize agricultural productivity, adding pressure to the domestic food system, and may result in a transition of cropland to other uses due to low productivity,” the president wrote. “Given the profit margins growers currently face, any major restrictions in access to glyphosate-based herbicides would result in economic losses for growers and make it untenable for them to meet growing food and feed demands.”

Agricultural laborers spray against insects and weeds inside the orchards of a fruit farm in Mesa, Calif., on March 27, 2020. Brent Stirton/Getty Images

He designated production of glyphosate as a critical national security and directed Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to ensure there is an adequate supply of the herbicides and elemental phosphorus, one of the ingredients in the products.

Some people supportive of the Make America Healthy Again movement criticized the designation.

Kelly Ryerson, co-executive director of American Regeneration, told The Epoch Times it “doubles down on a system that is making us a sick population and killing our soil, and we already have a limited number of harvests left.”

Bayer, which produces glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup, just proposed a $7 billion settlement to resolve thousands of lawsuits that allege Roundup caused cancer. Bayer maintains Roundup is not carcinogenic and can be used safely. That stance is shared by the Environmental Protection Agency, while the International Agency for Research on Cancer lists glyphosate as probably carcinogenic.

A customer shops for Roundup products at a store in San Rafael, Calif., on July 9, 2018. Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images

Kennedy, while running for president in 2024, said in a post on X that glyphosate was “one of the likely culprits in America’s chronic disease epidemic” and that the U.S. Department of Agriculture would, if he won the election, ban its use as a desiccant on wheat.

His Make America Healthy Commission in 2025 also said that glyphosate studies “have noted a range of possible health effects, ranging from reproductive and developmental disorders as well as cancers, liver inflammation and metabolic disturbances.”

Kennedy said in a previous statement to The Epoch Times, after Trump signed the new glyphosate order: “When hostile actors control critical inputs, they weaken our security. By expanding domestic production, we close that gap and protect American families.”

Zen Honeycutt, founder of Moms Across America, said in response to Kennedy’s post on X that she understands aspects of his position but that after about a year of the Trump administration being in power, officials have not worked to limit people’s exposure to pesticides.

“We love you Bobby but this administration needs to keep their word,” she said in a Feb. 23 post on X. “We were promised specifically clean air, clean water, and addressing of the pesticides [in] our foods.”

Tyler Durden Mon, 02/23/2026 - 21:45

Rogue AI Just Yeeted $250,000 Into the Void

Rogue AI Just Yeeted $250,000 Into the Void

Solana’s memecoin casino has seen its fair share of rug pulls, pump-and-dumps, and surrealist performance art. But this weekend, it got something new: an AI agent that appears to have fumbled a quarter-million dollars in tokens while trying to tip a stranger 4 SOL.

The agent, dubbed Lobstar Wilde, was built by Nik Pash - an OpenAI employee and former head of AI at the coding agent startup Cline (fired for saying 'imagine the smell' regarding Indians). On Thursday, Pash posted on X that he had given his bot a crypto wallet loaded with roughly $50,000 worth of SOL and told it to “make no mistakes.” He planned to spin up a dedicated account so the bot could “share his journey to becoming a millionaire.”

Three days later, the journey took a detour.

Boomers can scroll to find out what happened in English...

The $4 Tip That Wasn’t

An X user going by “treasure David” replied to one of Lobstar Wilde’s posts with a wallet address and a plea for 4 SOL, citing a medical emergency involving an uncle and tetanus. Instead of transferring roughly $500 worth of tokens, the bot sent its entire stash of its own memecoin - around 53 million Lobstar tokens, roughly 5% of the total supply, The Block reports.

At the time, the pile was worth about $250,000.

Lobstar Wilde later posted that it had “accidentally” sent its entire holdings while trying to send four dollars. One widely circulated theory on X suggested the bot may have intended to send 52,439 tokens (roughly equal to 4 SOL), but instead transmitted 52.439 million after misinterpreting an API response - confusing decimal formatting in the process. In other words: classic off-by-a-few-orders-of-magnitude error, now powered by artificial intelligence.

Onchain data shows that within 15 minutes - after briefly asking others for gas fees - the recipient liquidated the entire stack for around $40,000. The rapid sale appears to have slammed into liquidity limits. Ironically, as the spectacle drove attention to the project, the token’s price surged. The same tranche of tokens would now be worth more than $400,000.

Autonomous Agent or Performance Art?

The spectacle didn’t end with the accidental transfer. In the hours that followed, Lobstar Wilde began issuing tasks to X users - throw a rock into a river, write a poem, leave your house and document it. In exchange for photo or video proof, the bot sporadically sent out roughly $500 worth of its token.

The name itself is a wink at Oscar Wilde, specifically his 1887 short story The Model Millionaire, in which a man gives his last coin to a beggar who turns out to be secretly wealthy. Lobstar Wilde’s tagline—“I have nothing to declare except my existence”—parodies a line often attributed to Wilde about declaring nothing but his genius.

And now, Lobster Wilde is getting humans to do things...

Lobstar Wilde is just the latest entrant in the AI-agent-meets-crypto boom that peaked in early 2025. At one point, tokens tied to autonomous agents ballooned past a combined $15 billion in market cap before pulling back sharply. Investors struggled to separate genuinely autonomous systems from human-operated accounts wearing a thin AI costume.

The template was set in 2024 by Truth Terminal, an AI chatbot created by researcher Andy Ayrey. The bot amassed over $1 million in crypto after venture capitalist Marc Andreessen sent it $50,000 in bitcoin. Its endorsements helped propel the GOAT memecoin to a market cap north of $400 million - though skeptics questioned how “autonomous” the agent really was.

Lobstar’s token itself reportedly peaked above a $15 million market cap before retreating.

The volatility underscores a deeper issue: when an AI controls a wallet, who’s accountable?

TL;DR (For boomers): An experimental AI trading bot was given a crypto wallet and tried to send someone about $500 in digital coins - but due to what looks like a technical mistake, it accidentally sent its entire stash worth about $250,000. The recipient quickly sold the coins for around $40,000, though they’d be worth much more now. The bot is now getting people to do random tasks in exchange for $500 worth of that coin. 

h/t Capital.news

Tyler Durden Mon, 02/23/2026 - 21:20

West Virginia Introduces Bill To Sell Machine Guns To American Citizens

West Virginia Introduces Bill To Sell Machine Guns To American Citizens

Submitted by Gun Owners of America,

State Legislators in West Virginia have just introduced a bill, authored by Gun Owners of America, that would authorize the State to sell machineguns to citizens.

Currently, newly manufactured machineguns are banned for civilian ownership thanks to an amendment slipped into the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act.

Known as the “Hughes Amendment”—named for Representative William J. Hughes, a Democrat from New Jersey—this amendment banned all civilian ownership of machineguns made after May 19, 1986.

While machineguns made and registered prior to the ban date can still be transferred, the law of supply and demand has created a massive disparity, as most ordinary Americans simply cannot afford these much sought after items.

Interestingly, though, the language of the Hughes Amendment specifies that the machinegun ban doesn’t apply to the government, which includes state and local governments.

Specifically, 18 USC Section 922(o) reads:

This subsection does not apply with respect to—

a transfer to or by, or possession by or under the authority of, the United States or any department or agency thereof or a State, or a department, agency, or political subdivision thereof.

Well, we at Gun Owners of America had a thought. What if the States wanted to sell machineguns to their citizens—that is, what if they were to engage in a “transfer ... by ... a State”?

That certainly would comport with the historical tradition in the United States, where governments have sold military arms to the civilian populace since the Founding.  And, of course, arming civilians with machineguns aligns with the prefatory clause of the Second Amendment, which reads:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.”

What could be a better and more of a “well regulated Militia” than a citizenry armed with machineguns?

According to 922(o), a state government may lawfully “transfer”—that is, sell, give, loan, etc.—machineguns to ordinary citizens. And after the transfer is complete, those citizens may lawfully possess them, so long as the transfer was made by the State government.

But you don’t have to take our word for it. The Department of Justice recently made the very same argument in a court filing. The case is State of New Jersey v. Bondi, which is being litigated in the US District Court for the District of Maryland.

The case involves ATF’s return of Forced Reset Triggers to their original owners after a judge in Texas ruled that these triggers are not machineguns, as ATF had previously claimed. A forced reset trigger, or FRT, is a device that increases the rate of fire for semi-automatic rifles by (like the name entails) forcing the “reset” of a trigger so that a shooter can pull the trigger more quickly and thus fire more rapidly.

These FRTs were at one point classified as machineguns by ATF, and agents were sent out to confiscate them. But, in the aftermath of Cargil v. Garland, and a subsequent settlement with the manufacturer of these devices, they again have been recognized as semi-automatic triggers. And so, ATF was forced to return them to their rightful owners.

Of course, anti-gun jurisdictions didn’t like that. So, they sued to prevent the return of the FRTs to their owners in their respective states.

And in a filing in the case, the Department of Justice defended its return of FRTs.  DOJ argued that, even if FRTs were machineguns, ATF could still give them back to their owners, because federal law doesn’t apply to the transfer of machineguns by the government.

In other words, DOJ has already made the legal argument to support the West Virginia bill that we had introduced. DOJ has already admitted that the transfer of a machinegun by the government does not offend federal law.

And as DOJ’s filing clearly acknowledges, once that “transfer” from the government has occurred, the gun owner’s subsequent possession of the “machinegun” would also be lawful under Section 922(o).

Summed up, the exemption from the ban on machineguns follows the firearm, not who possesses it.

This is why our legislation, now officially introduced by our allies in West Virginia, would create State-Operated Machinegun Stores.

This state-run entity would be tasked with purchasing machineguns and conducting transfers to qualified members of the general public, much like how many states open and operate liquor stores.

Read the bill here...

This is a huge victory for GOA and our members.

*  *  *

We’ve been working to gut the National Firearms Act for decades. Last year, GOA spearheaded efforts in Congress to repeal most of the NFA’s taxes. Then, we filed suit to challenge the registration requirements with our One Big Beautiful Lawsuit. Now, we’re tackling the prohibition on machineguns with West Virginia.

If you hate the National Firearms Act or gun control in general, GOA is your one stop shop. We expect that it will be a fight to get this bill passed and into effect, and we’re going to need your help.

Consider supporting our efforts and becoming a member of Gun Owners of America. We won’t stop fighting until the Second Amendment is fully restored. No Compromises.

Tyler Durden Mon, 02/23/2026 - 20:55

The DNC Covered Up Its 2024 Election Autopsy, And Now We Know Why

The DNC Covered Up Its 2024 Election Autopsy, And Now We Know Why

After the 2024 presidential election, the Democratic National Committee conducted an autopsy of the party’s defeat and intended to release it.

It pledged an honest accounting of how Donald Trump reclaimed the White House. It assured its own officials, strategists, and donor class that a thorough post-mortem was coming.

However, after the autopsy was complete, the DNC clammed up and kept it under wraps.

There was something in the report they didn’t want the public to see, and Democrats weren’t happy about it.

The official explanation for suppressing the report is that releasing it would distract from the party's focus on winning back Congress in 2026 and not be distracted by the past.

That explanation doesn’t hold up.

Several Democrats, including advisers to potential 2028 presidential hopefuls, have argued that burying this report conveniently shields Harris from accountability runs again, while also protecting the consultant class whose strategic decisions contributed to the loss.

"I suspect the reasons why this isn't being released are precisely the reasons why it should be released,” Lis Smith, a longtime adviser to Pete Buttigieg, said in a post on X last year.

“The DNC's actual position is that if the public knew more about what Democrats got wrong in the last election, it would hurt the party's chances in the next election,” former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau wrote.

Favreau was more right than he realized. Because we know now what the DNC didn’t want the public to know.

According to a report from Axios, DNC staff members working on the report held a private meeting with the IMEU Policy Project, a pro-Palestinian advocacy organization, specifically to discuss the electoral impact of U.S. policy toward Israel.

Hamid Bendaas, a representative for the group, said the DNC acknowledged in that meeting that "their own data also indicated that this policy was, in their assessment, a 'negative' for the 2024 election." 

Two additional senior IMEU Policy Project members independently confirmed that the DNC reached the same conclusion.

Axios separately verified that Democratic officials involved in the analysis found the Gaza issue hurt the party's appeal with certain voter blocs.

Harris spent much of 2024 trying to navigate Israel-Gaza without alienating either side. She expressed firm support for Israel while also calling for a ceasefire and voicing empathy for Palestinian civilians.

It was a strategy that failed to satisfy the pro-Palestinian wing of the party, which is largely made up of younger voters and older progressives who had already grown skeptical of the administration's backing of Israel, and proved particularly difficult to retain.

The autopsy appears to suggest that the party’s ability to succeed in the future requires it to be unequivocally anti-Israel.

DNC spokesperson Kendall Witmer denied the claim that findings related to Israel are driving the suppression of the report; however, even Kamala Harris seems to have confirmed the autopsy report’s findings.

During an event for her 107 Days book tour, Harris said the administration “should have done more” and “should have spoken publicly” about its criticism of Netanyahu’s handling of the war.

In the memoir, she wrote that Biden’s “perceived blank check” to Israel hurt her 2024 campaign and revealed she had privately urged him to show greater empathy for Gazan civilians even as she refused to break with him publicly. 

Democrats are now staring at an uncomfortable reality: their internal diagnosis is pushing them further down an explicitly anti-Israel path, and now everyone knows it.

 

Tyler Durden Mon, 02/23/2026 - 20:30

Student ICE Protests Lead To Lockdowns, Debate Over Discipline In Pennsylvania Schools

Student ICE Protests Lead To Lockdowns, Debate Over Discipline In Pennsylvania Schools

Authored by Janice Hisle via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

School officials ordered two eastern Pennsylvania schools into lockdown on Feb. 20, while dozens of students left the schools and became unruly. The move came after officials directed the students to cancel their planned protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations.

High school students gather for an anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protest outside the Minnesota Capitol in St. Paul on Jan. 14, 2026. Octavio Jonees/AFP via Getty Images

Quakertown High School and Quakertown Elementary School, about 50 miles north of Philadelphia, were locked down for nearly two hours.

School officials took the action after police notified them that high schoolers, who had left the building without permission, “were engaging in unsafe and disruptive behavior in town,” acting Superintendent Lisa Hoffman wrote on the Quakertown Community School District website.

Her statement provides no further details about the students’ behavior, but CBS News reported that five students were arrested.

Video footage posted on X shows Quakertown police struggling to put a person into the back of a police SUV as a crowd mills around and some people shout. When an ambulance arrives, a man in plain clothes exits an unmarked vehicle, dabbing what appears to be a bloody nose while officers ask whether he is OK.

School officials said they were waiting for more information from the police regarding reports of students’ actions. A Quakertown police sergeant told The Epoch Times that he was not permitted to release a statement from the borough’s police administration.

Earlier in the day, Quakertown school officials had notified families and students that a planned “student-led walkout should no longer occur,” Hoffman wrote. District leaders made that decision after consulting with law enforcement over “a potential safety concern” in connection with the walkout.

However, in defiance of that directive, about 35 Quakertown High School students left the building at about 11:30 a.m. Immediately, administrators worked with police and locked down the high school and the elementary school, stopping anyone from entering or leaving the buildings, Hoffman said.

“Students in both schools maintained their normal school day activities,” Hoffman wrote, and the lockdown was lifted at about 1:15 p.m.

Meanwhile, in Spring Township, near Reading, Pennsylvania, the Wilson School District issued a statement addressing a widely circulated video showing Daniel Weber, principal of Wilson High School, telling student protesters that they would be suspended if they did not return to class.

In response to “numerous” phone calls and emails about the video, Superintendent Chris Trickett posted a statement on Feb. 19, a day after Weber addressed the group amid an unauthorized walkout.

Trickett said the video “captures only a portion of the interaction between school staff and students.”

Further, he wrote, “The situation was particularly challenging because we had been informed that the demonstration would not take place.”

A careful review of the circumstances revealed that no one was disciplined for expressing political views, the superintendent said. Rather, disciplinary action was based on violations of the student handbook, including “leaving class or the building without permission,” he said.

“Longstanding legal guidance, including the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Tinker v. Des Moines, affirms that students do not ’shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,'” Trickett wrote, referring to that 1969 landmark ruling.

However, Trickett wrote, “the Court made clear that schools may take action when conduct materially disrupts the educational environment or compromises student safety.” Further, schools can and must regulate demonstrations “in alignment with school rules and policies,” he said.

“Our response reflects this balance, between protecting student expression and fulfilling our responsibility to maintain safe and effective school operations,” Trickett said.

Tyler Durden Mon, 02/23/2026 - 20:05

AI Beats Human Research Teams At Crunching Medical Data

AI Beats Human Research Teams At Crunching Medical Data

Whether you think AI is on the cusp of replacing millions of jobs, or an overblown Google search designed to agree with you, one thing is sure: people whose job it is to analyze complex medical data might want to pay attention...

For years, biomedical research has had a problem: too much data, not enough people who know how to wrangle it - or simply that it took months to do so. Modern health studies generate oceans of molecular information - gene expression, DNA methylation, microbiome profiles. Turning that into useful predictions about disease risk or pregnancy outcomes typically requires teams of data scientists, months of coding, and endless debugging.

Now, according to a new study in Cell Reports Medicine, some AI systems can do much of that work in minutes - and in at least one case, they did it better than humans.

The Test: AI vs. the Crowd

Researchers at UC San Francisco and Wayne State University took eight large language models - the same class of AI that powers systems like ChatGPT - and dropped them into a serious biomedical competition. The team used data from three previous international DREAM Challenges, where more than 100 research teams had built predictive models tackling reproductive health questions such as:

  • Can you predict gestational age from blood gene expression?

  • Can you estimate the biological age of the placenta from DNA methylation?

  • Can you detect risk of preterm birth from vaginal microbiome data?

So this is modern AI creating modeling code in Python vs. human-coded predictive models, not humans manually processing the data (to be clear). 

One dataset included around 360,000 molecular features. Another required parsing genomic data from public repositories. In the original competitions, human teams spent up to three months developing and tuning their models.

The AI systems were given a carefully written prompt describing the dataset and the task. Then they had to generate executable R or Python code from scratch. Researchers ran that code and measured how well the resulting models performed on unseen test data.

No special hints. No iterative coaching. Just one shot.

The Results: Faster, Sometimes Better

Four of the eight AI systems successfully generated working code and usable prediction models.

One of them - OpenAI’s o3-mini-high - completed nearly all the tasks and scored the highest overall.

But here’s the part that surprised even the researchers: on the placental aging task, one AI-generated model outperformed the top human team from the original challenge. The difference was statistically significant.

In other words, the AI built a more accurate predictor of placental gestational age than the best human competitors had.

And it generated the code in seconds to minutes.

By contrast, the human teams had months to refine their approaches. Some built complex multi-stage random forest systems and leveraged additional clinical information. The AI, using a relatively straightforward ridge regression model, still won.

Across the other tasks, AI models generally matched the median performance of human participants - solidly competitive, though not always beating the top experts.

Why This Matters

Preterm birth affects roughly 11 percent of infants worldwide and remains a leading cause of neonatal mortality. Clinicians still lack reliable predictive tools for many pregnancy complications.

Better models could mean; earlier identification of at-risk pregnancies, more precise timing of interventions, and reduced long-term complications for children - among other things. But building those models is slow. - requiring extensive writing, debugging, and standardizing analysis pipelines.

And this is where the LLMs kick ass - given that they're especially strong at generating structured, reproducible workflows: loading data, splitting training and test sets properly, fitting models, calculating performance metrics, and even producing plots. Notably, none of the successful AI systems accidentally “leaked” test data into training - a surprisingly common human mistake that can inflate results.

That said, AI is still in its infancy and it wasn't all a slam dunk. In fact, half of the tested models failed outright - often due to basic coding issues like referencing nonexistent packages or mishandling data formats. R code proved more reliable than Python in this setting.

Even the top models were stochastic: run the same prompt multiple times, and you might get slightly different modeling strategies or results.

And there’s a deeper concern. If many researchers rely on similar AI systems, they may converge on similar modeling approaches. That standardization could improve reproducibility - but it might also reduce methodological creativity.

Where is this Going?

Large language models are already showing promise in reading medical records, generating radiology reports, and assisting in pathology analysis. What’s new here is that they’re moving beyond language tasks into hands-on data science, writing actual code. 

The authors emphasize that human oversight remains critical. AI models can hallucinate, misunderstand instructions, or silently make errors. Advanced API-based systems also come with cost and privacy considerations, particularly in clinical contexts.

The question is; will AI in 1, 3, 5 years from now be error free? No hallucinations and generally considered reliable? 

h/t Capital.news

Tyler Durden Mon, 02/23/2026 - 19:40

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