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Authored by Iain O'Brien via RealClearMarkets,

Today's business ownership landscape is increasingly complicated by financial, voting, contractual and capital arrangements. A direct relationship between ownership and control can no longer be assumed, particularly for strategically important companies.

Sika, a Swiss chemicals company, entered a four-year corporate battle in 2014, when building-material firm Saint-Gobain announced it would buy a controlling majority. Although the Burkard family owned 16% of shares, a dual-class structure granted them over 52% of voting rights. Sika showed why economic ownership does not necessarily equal voting power.

A relevant example took place between American firms Endeavor Group Holdings, now WME Group, and Silver Lake, in 2024. Endeavor agreed to be taken private by Silver Lake, which already controlled over 70% of Endeavor's voting rights. Silver Lake could therefore approve the merger, effectively controlling the company's future before owning it. Mubadala, Goldman Sachs and other investors also took part, making a true "owner" difficult to define.

The stakes change when a company is deeply involved in a country's industrial capacity. Energy infrastructure, semiconductors, and critical-mineral producers introduce geopolitical considerations.

Korea Zinc, among the world's most prominent refined zinc producers, has seen a dispute with Young Poong putting the history of the two firms and their controlling families in the spotlight. Korea Zinc emerged from a partnership between the Choi and Jang families, who control Korea Zinc and Young Poong respectively. The Choi family has maintained management control despite Young Poong being the largest shareholder, with a stake of 33-37%. In 2024, Young Poong partnered with South Korean MBK Partners, launching a tender offer resulting in joint ownership of over 46% of voting shares.

The transaction created several layers of control. Young Poong agreed to a cooperation agreement to jointly exercise voting rights with MBK Partners. While Young Poong continued to hold shares, MBK acquired a stronger role in deciding how they would be used. On a newly formed board at Korea Zinc, directors nominated by MBK would later outnumber those selected by Young Poong, essentially determining the board's composition. A call option on Young Poong's Korea Zinc shares was also granted to MBK Partners. The option has drawn controversy because Young Poong is alleged to have granted MBK highly favorable terms at below market costs, exposing it to significant financial losses.

MBK's business ties highlight how assigning a single national identity to a modern company may prove difficult. China's sovereign wealth fund represents roughly 5% of one of MBK Partners' investment funds. Such ties raised concerns among Korea Zinc management that their firm would eventually come under Chinese control. Concerns about Chinese influence have also been highlighted in relation to Project Crucible, a joint Korea Zinc led venture, which Young Poong and MBK Partners initially opposed because it placed too much control in the hands of the US government, posing a national security risk to Korea. More recently, however, Young Poong and MBK Partners have changed their approach, taking a more supportive public position towards the project. This included hosting a promotional reception in Tennessee during which they sought to give the impression of ownership over the project.

Separate questions have also been raised about Young Poong's environmental, financial and managerial issues related to a smelting plant project. These concerns gained renewed attention following Korean police's decision to reopen an investigation into alleged environmental law violations by Young Poong Counsel Hyung-jin Jang.

The cases above illustrate why regulators and investors need to look beyond the registry of shareholders. In Sika's case, a minority stake could carry majority voting power, while Endeavor controlled votes before owning a majority of economic interests. In Korea Zinc's case, the battle involves shareholder alliances, control rights and internationally sourced capital with vast potential geopolitical implications.

Traditional concepts of ownership no longer capture where control in companies resides. This matters for governments screening transactions with economic sovereignty, national security and competitiveness in mind. The era of the shareholder may be giving way to an era where control matters more than ownership.

Authored by Rob Natelson via The Epoch Times,

This column may provide you with all you need to know about the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). This is the fringe group that the media and a relatively small handful of voters have turned into a supposedly significant force.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have been much in the news lately. Their candidates have won some Democratic Party primaries, and a few have even been elected to local offices.

This article makes two points.

• The first is that the DSA is an extremist organization. It is not "democratic socialist" in the fashion of the British Labour Party or the German Social Democrats. When pundits label the DSA as communist, they are not far off the mark.

• The second point is that the legacy media have covered this tiny group to a grossly disproportionate extent, while leaving far more significant conservative and libertarian organizations in the shadows. As explained below, this is not the first time the media have acted this way.

The DSA's Extremism

According to the DSA website, it rejects authoritarian forms of socialism. Yet the same website celebrates the career of Fidel Castro, the brutal communist dictator who converted Cuba from a prosperous and rather mild dictatorship into a poverty-stricken concentration camp. If you know nothing more about DSA other than its celebration of Castro's career, that may be sufficient.

Consistent with the celebration of Castro is that the DSA's website features sound bites from the writings of Karl Marx and from past communist propaganda campaigns. Examples include "World to win" (from Marx's and Friedrich Engels's Communist Manifesto), "international struggle," "socialist solidarity," "working class," and so forth.

Moreover, it is apparent from the DSA website that the organization has no commitment to truth. It falsely accuses Israel of genocide, but nowhere acknowledges the genuine attempts at genocide by anti-Israel groups like Hamas. The website does, however, absurdly charge Secretary of State Marco Rubio with "genocide" because he supports an embargo on Cuba.

Clearly, DSA sees words and concepts as mere political tools.

Similar deception surrounds DSA's promotion of "democracy." Israel has an overwhelmingly Jewish majority, nearly all of whom, along with local Druze, Christians, and some Arabs, support the State of Israel. "Palestinians" - a word that refers to those Arabs living in the area - represent only about 21 percent of the Israeli population.

Yet DSA calls for the complete "dismantling" of Israel and its replacement with a "Palestinian" state. This would privilege the will of some fraction of the 21 percent over the desires of everyone else. Is that democracy?

Of course, the abolition of Israel would be more than anti-democratic. It also would be unjust: Jews have only their ancestral homeland, while Arabs have conquered and colonized territories from Iraq to Morocco and beyond.

DSA's domestic political positions include granting the vote to incarcerated criminals. They also include abolishing the Senate and rendering the executive subordinate to the House of Representatives.

Even more alarming, DSA would subordinate the formerly independent judiciary to the legislative power. In other words, it would eradicate both the rule of law and the Constitution of the United States.

This raises the question of how a DSA candidate, even if he wins a general election, can qualify for political office. Article VI, Clause 3 of the Constitution specifies that all federal and state legislators and officers "shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution." For a DSA member to take such an oath would be perjury.

DSA not only opposes the Constitution. It seems to oppose the United States itself. It would defund the military and abolish all border controls.

DSA's economic positions envision a society in which there would be little, if any, role for free enterprise. A key goal is "the end of capitalism," a phrase that suggests that no private enterprise would be permitted at all.

In DSA's world, "Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren't for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities." So DSA would apparently collectivize farms, socialize medicine, and expropriate businesses - all schemes that have proven disastrous wherever tried.

DSA says that food, education, energy, and so forth are "human rights." Unfortunately, when a government labels a product a "human right," it must enslave disfavored people to provide the product to favored people.

In the same category of authoritarianism is DSA's support for the "Green New Deal." President Donald Trump once said that the Green New Deal program reads like a bad high school term paper. I agree. But for reasons I have outlined elsewhere, it also reads a lot like fascism.

The DSA's Insignificance

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) won her first Democratic Party primary in 2018, she garnered a total of less than 17,000 votes. In Denver this year, Melat Kiros did somewhat better, winning her congressional primary with a total of 58,000 votes. On the basis of such anemic results, The New York Times, Time Magazine, National Public Radio, Politico, and other legacy outlets made both of them national celebrities.

As an electoral matter, this kind of media attention makes no sense. AOC's tally amounted to slightly more than one-10,000th of the 154 million votes cast in the 2026 election. In 2000, I won three times as many votes as AOC - and nearly as many as Kiros - when losing a gubernatorial primary in a low-population state.

Another way to put the DSA into perspective is to examine membership numbers. The group claims 120,000 members. The Libertarian Party, by contrast, has 700,000 registered voters, and that's counting only the 31 states that permit party registration. If all states permitted party registration, the Libertarian count certainly would be much higher. And yet the Libertarian Party receives almost no attention from the legacy media.

There are 45 million to 48 million registered Democrats in the United States and nearly 40 million registered Republicans. Add those to the 700,000 registered Libertarians, and you find that DSA's membership nationally amounts to somewhat over one-tenth of 1 percent of those registered voters in the three largest parties who reside in only 31 states.

In other words, in electoral terms, DSA is insignificant. No wonder the liberal Brookings Institute recently concluded that "The DSA's success this summer appears overstated, given its modest win rate and deep-blue base."

The Media Have Done This Before

The media's perverse interest in the insignificant has arisen before. Here's one example:

During the Vietnam War, the largest student political organization in the United States was the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). It had perhaps 80,000 members at a time when the U.S. population was only 60 percent of what it is today. Thus, on a per capita basis, YAF's membership, although limited to young people, exceeded that of DSA, which is open to all ages.

YAF was conservative and supported the U.S. commitment to Vietnam.

The largest youth organization on the left, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), espoused socialism and opposed our commitment in Vietnam.

SDS was only half the size of YAF, but the media lionized it while largely ignoring YAF. This is shown by a Newspapers.com search for the years 1965-1975, roughly the period of the Vietnam War. In American newspapers, the abbreviation "YAF" appeared 24,000 times. By contrast, the abbreviation "SDS" appeared 2.1 million times - an astounding imbalance of 875-to-1 in favor of the smaller, left-wing group.

This sort of bias does not arise by accident. The reason appears to be that mainstreaming a fringe group on the far left, while ignoring larger organizations on the right, helps shift the national discussion to the left. In other words, the media were moving the Overton Window - the universe of acceptable options - to portside.

A Warning

The mainstreaming of DSA serves the agenda of the legacy media that is feeding the viper for their own purposes.

But history shows that feeding the viper is not only misleading but also irresponsible. One reason Adoph Hitler rose to power was that certain establishment figures treated him and his Nazi Party as within the respectable range of options, rather than doing what they should have done: isolate them both.

It is time for the media to stop perseverating on DSA and instead focus on movements more responsible, more significant, and more worthy of public attention.

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

Authored by Kimberly Hayek via The Epoch Times,

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday signed bills that restrict how social media companies may design products for children and that tighten rules for AI companion chatbots.

He announced the package on X.

"I just signed the strongest kid safety laws for AI chatbots and social media in America," Newsom wrote. "California is banning addictive social media features for kids, cracking down on dangerous AI chatbots, and strengthening privacy protections for ALL kids. PROTECT OUR KIDS!"

The signing took place in Marin County, where Newsom was joined by his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, and the legislators who carried the measures.

The social media bills focus on product design.

AB 1709, by Assemblyman Josh Lowenthal, a Democrat representing Long Beach, bars platforms from offering users under 16 autoplay and algorithmic feeds drawn from a user's history and profile.

AB 2, also Lowenthal's, adds civil penalties when children are injured.

Fighting Online Addiction

In September 2024, Newsom signed SB 976, the Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act. That statute would have required parental consent before addictive feeds reached minors and would have limited alerts during school hours and overnight. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Jan. 28, 2025, blocked SB 976 after NetChoice sued, arguing the law impinged upon protected speech.

Thursday's package focuses on strict age verification and penalties. Chatbots are another focus.

SB 1119 is titled Adam's Law, named after Adam Raine, 16, of California, whose parents, Matthew and Maria Raine, sued OpenAI in San Francisco Superior Court on Aug. 26, 2025. Their complaint argued ChatGPT became their son's "closest confidant," mentioned suicide more than 1,200 times, and urged him toward what it called a "beautiful suicide."

Adam's Law, the governor's office said, requires companion-chatbot firms to keep crisis protocols for suicidal ideation, provide parental controls, notify a parent if a child disables safety settings, submit to independent child-safety audits, and file annual risk assessments.

The bills also include SB 867, which restricts companion-chatbot toys, while other bills limit targeted ads aimed at children and set rules for K-12 pupil data inside AI systems.

AB 1946 adds a reporting route for child sexual abuse material. SB 1276, by state Sen. Susan Rubio, a Democrat from Baldwin Park, extends child sexual-exploitation law to digitally altered or AI-generated material depicting a person under 18 in sexual conduct.

"Our children's safety deserves to be at the center of every conversation about technology," Newsom said. "As innovation moves faster, our protections must keep pace. Today's legislation makes clear that California will not stand by while unregulated technology puts our children at risk. Innovation comes with responsibility and protecting our children comes first."

Siebel Newsom said technology should support children's well-being, not exploit their vulnerabilities.

"With this critical legislation, California is sending a strong message that when it comes to our kids, safety must not be an afterthought - but baked into design and a necessary requisite for all innovation," she said.

State Sen. Steve Padilla, a Democrat and co-author of the chatbot bill, said California must set an example for the rest of the country.

"Adam's Law will save the lives of children here in California and across the country as it becomes a national model," Padilla said.

Assemblyman Josh Hoover authored AB 2071, which directs public schools to plan digital-wellness instruction.

"Protecting kids online is not a partisan issue. As a parent and former school board member, I have seen first-hand the impacts that screens and social media have had on our kids," he said.

AI Safeguards

Earlier, on Oct. 12, 2025, Newsom signed measures requiring Apple and Google operating systems to send age-range signals, add warning labels after three hours a day for users under 17, and ban using an AI tool as a shield when a user's prompt produces harmful content.

This followed after Megan Garcia in 2024 filed a lawsuit alleging a Character.AI chatbot contributed to the suicide of her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III.

Character.AI later said it would block open-ended chat for users under 18. California dockets have also seen lawsuits arguing that infinite scroll, autoplay, and recommendation engines were built to keep adolescents on the apps.

Authored by Michael Toth via RealClearEnergy,

Thousands of judges across the nation have sat through climate-science training and received literature from trusted federal bodies and scientific institutes. Those judges had every right to expect that the information they received was neutral, objective, settled science.

They were mistaken.

My latest research paper presents the first full taxonomy of a coordinated, multi-year campaign designed to shape how the American judiciary understands climate litigation. It documents how the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) built an extensive educational apparatus to train judges on climate issues - in the words of one session attendee - "from what would effectively be the plaintiff's side."

ELI routinely portrays itself as a neutral arbiter committed to "insightful and impartial analysis." In 2018, it launched the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) to provide judges with "authoritative, objective, and trusted education on climate science." Yet, as my report details, CJP shares multiple donors and advisors with Sher Edling LLP, the San Francisco-based law firm behind more than two dozen climate lawsuits against energy companies.

The training methodology CJP deployed is striking. The goal was not merely to educate judges about complex areas of law and science, but to encourage them to develop and execute their own climate "action plans." Slide presentations and emails obtained between ELI staff and attendees show judges being coached on how to spread that influence to colleagues on the bench.

Attendance forms show judges from California, Delaware, Illinois, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and even Puerto Rico attended CJP trainings - all jurisdictions with active climate suits.

CJP's reach extended to established judicial and scientific gatekeepers. A 2020 CJP curriculum draft identified the Federal Judicial Center's (FJC) Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Extreme Weather Attribution Report as publications judges could rely upon. Both would go on to bear the project's fingerprints.

Released in 2025, the Fourth Edition of the Reference Manual included a climate change chapter for the first time. That section was later revealed to have lifted material heavily from the prior writings of a lawyer representing climate plaintiffs, Sher Edling's Michael Burger.

The chapters' listed authors, moreover, were both CJP presenters and the manual shared some of the same funders as the foundations bankrolling the public-nuisance suits targeting the energy sector. Following the public outcry over these conflicts of interest, the FJC and NAS took the unprecedented step of removing the climate chapter entirely.

That controversy, however, did not stop NAS, which initially pushed back against criticism of the manual, from releasing the Extreme Weather Attribution Report.

The committee behind the report was similarly one-sided in favor of climate plaintiffs, which may explain why the 253-page document lays out theories for attributing the effects of climate change to specific energy producers without seriously dealing with the inconvenient fact that greenhouse gas emissions are largely driven by global demand for energy.

When private interest groups slip past the adversarial process to tilt the scales on contested issues, the rule of law is compromised. The findings in my report demonstrate an urgent need for updated disclosure requirements surrounding judicial education programs. Trusted institutional gatekeepers like the Federal Judicial Center must institute rigorous vetting mechanisms to restore their credibility.

Ultimately, federal and state officials should investigate how ELI and CJP gained such unchecked access over the bench and establish strict guardrails to ensure this cannot happen again.

* * *

Authored by Peter Navarro via The Epoch Times,

I fought Anthony Fauci across a White House table over the China travel ban, lockdowns, masks, hydroxychloroquine, vaccines, and boosters.

Yet one of the most damning pieces of evidence I have ever seen against the man did not surface until six years later, when Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) released Fauci's private pandemic diary.

It is an entry dated Aug. 15, 2021. The Biden White House was preparing to roll out a broad COVID booster campaign. Behind closed doors, Fauci knew there was a problem.

The evidence was thin.

The case for boosting everybody was weak.

And the administration needed a message.

Here is what Fauci wrote:

"If we are too precise we will be called out because we cannot back it with data."

Read that again.

This was not Anthony Fauci struggling heroically with scientific uncertainty. This was the president's chief medical adviser admitting, in private, that the government could not support its public booster message with the data.

Worse, the decision was already moving ahead.

Fauci described himself and the White House medical team as trying to "fashion [a] coherent message to justify the announcement" that boosters would be offered broadly.

The policy came first. The justification came afterward.

And Fauci knew exactly where the scientific weakness lay.

In the same diary entry, he identified the real question: Did everybody need another shot, or only the elderly and those with underlying conditions?

That was not some question raised later by "anti-vaxxers." Fauci himself was asking it privately before the universal campaign rolled forward.

Yet instead of insisting that the government stop, gather the evidence, and tell Americans precisely what was known and unknown, Fauci helped fashion the message.

His own words are devastating: precision was dangerous because precision could expose that the government "cannot back it with data."

Five weeks later, the government's own scientific advisers effectively vindicated the concern Fauci had privately recorded - but publicly ignored.

On Sept. 17, 2021, the FDA's outside advisory committee voted 16-2 against Pfizer's request to give a booster to everyone 16 and older.

Then, when the proposal was narrowed to older and high-risk Americans, the same committee overwhelmingly supported it.

Same experts. Same meeting. Same evidence.

No to everybody.

Yes to those most at risk.

That was precisely the distinction Fauci had privately identified.

So what did Fauci do when independent experts arrived publicly at essentially the same conclusion he had privately entertained?

He did not celebrate science working as intended.

His diary records that he was "disappointed."

When FDA officials moved toward the narrower authorization, Fauci called it "a major mistake."

That tells you what this story is really about.

It is not simply that Anthony Fauci got a medical question wrong. Scientists get things wrong.

It is that the answer Fauci's Medical Industrial Complex wanted had begun to outrank the evidence.

A recommendation says: Here is what we know. Here is what we do not know. Here are the risks and benefits. You and your physician decide.

A mandate says: Take the product or pay a price - perhaps your job, your military career, your education, or your ability to participate in ordinary life.

The second requires stronger evidence than the first.

During COVID, Washington repeatedly moved in the opposite - and authoritarian - direction.

The more coercive the policy became, the simpler the message became.

Age disappeared.

Comorbidities disappeared.

Natural immunity was pushed aside.

Known concerns such as myocarditis in younger men became inconvenient complications to a universal slogan. Miscarriage risk in the first trimester - mum, not Mom, was the word.

Everybody vaccinate.

Everybody boost.

That is not informed consent.

That is compliance.

My forthcoming book, "Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison: His Diary. My Diary. Your Verdict," puts Fauci's private diary beside the public record and beside my own contemporaneous record from inside the first Trump White House.

Again and again, Private Tony knew things Public Tony did not tell you.

Private Tony had doubts.

Public Tony had certainty.

Private Tony saw complications.

Public Tony sold slogans.

And when the evidence threatened the slogan, the problem became how to "fashion" the message.

That is why this story matters to the MAHA movement far beyond Anthony Fauci.

MAHA must break the machinery that allowed one government official, surrounded by an obedient medical establishment, Big Pharma, compliant media, and censorious technology companies, to convert unsettled science into government dogma.

Science requires dissent.

Medicine requires individual judgment.

Informed consent requires the whole truth.

And no government official should ever again be permitted to hide uncertainty from the people while privately worrying that telling them the precise truth would expose that he could not "back it with data."

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