This is not what the Trump administration wanted to see after this week's Abu Dhabi trilateral talks, and as the team of Kushner-Witkoff, Trump's special envoys, are in Moscow where they met with President Vladimir Putin.

Putin's aide and representative to the talks, Yuri Ushakov, batted down Western efforts to get the Europeans at the table. He said that the Europeans need to decide between "peace" or "war" - in reference to Europe's drive to keep up maximum military support to Kyiv even as the US shows signs of backing off the intensity of assistance.

EuroNews writes, "Moscow has long equated Europe to a warring party due to the provision of weapons and ammunition that allies have sent to Kyiv."

"So far, all their practical actions point precisely to the latter," Ushakov said.

EuroNews also concluded, "After Steve Witkoff raised hopes that Europeans and Russians would soon sit at the same time, Moscow minimized the prospect and said Europe should cease military support for Ukraine."

For Russia, a "longterm settlement" means nothing less than full political recognition over the four eastern terrirtories and of course Crimea.

Zelensky has consistently rejected the prospected of a major land swap. He's lobbied the EU and NATO to keep up Kiev's maximal demands.

Moscow seems content with drawing out the process for as long is it takes, per another TASS readout:

US negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner may visit Moscow within the next two weeks, a source told TASS.

"There is indeed such a possibility. The details will be agreed upon," the source said, commenting on the possibility of a visit within the next couple of weeks.

The presidents of Russia and the United States held a phone call on October 9, discussing Russian diesel supplies. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak told TASS that Moscow would immediately begin lifting restrictions on diesel exports ahead of schedule.

Pro-Ukraine pundits not happy at these developments...

And so it remains clear that the Russian approach is to ultimately see things settled on the ground and in the battlefield regarding the 'special military operation' - despite immense troop losses on both sides.

Authored by James Yang via The Epoch Times,

Medical assistance in dying (MAID) would rank as the fourth-leading cause of death in Canada if deaths involving the procedure were counted separately, figures from Health Canada and Statistics Canada show.

MAID would rank behind only cancer, heart disease, and accidents - Canada's three leading causes of death in 2024. Cancer accounted for 85,589 deaths, followed by heart disease at 57,982 and accidents at 20,415.

The 16,499 Canadians who received MAID that year outnumbered those who died from several other major causes. A total of 13,680 Canadians died from cerebrovascular diseases, 13,202 died from chronic lower respiratory diseases, 7,658 died from influenza and pneumonia, 6,874 died from diabetes, and 5,294 died from Alzheimer's disease.

However, Statistics Canada does not count MAID as a separate cause of death. Instead, deaths involving MAID are counted under the medical conditions that led people to seek assisted dying, such as cancer or neurological diseases.

This means MAID deaths are already included in the totals for other causes of death. The figures can't be added together, and MAID's fourth-place ranking is not an official classification.

MAID and Life Expectancy

Medical assistance in dying also inevitably affects Canada's life expectancy statistics because it brings about deaths earlier than they would otherwise occur. It's hard to estimate how big that impact might be though.

A comparison of provincial life expectancy and the median age of MAID recipients shows that people who received MAID were generally younger than the average life expectancy in their province, according to figures from Statistics Canada and Health Canada.

The largest differences were in Quebec, New Brunswick, and Alberta, where the median age of MAID recipients was five years below provincial life expectancy. Ontario recorded a three-year difference, while British Columbia had a two-year difference.

MAID deaths are included in Canada's death statistics and can affect the country's overall life expectancy. However, the chart doesn't show how large that effect is. To find out, researchers would need to estimate how much longer MAID recipients would have lived without assisted dying.

Last month, the federal government tabled legislation to indefinitely exclude people whose sole medical condition is a mental illness from receiving MAID. However, the government is also expanding MAID by allowing advance requests from people with serious illnesses who may lose the capacity to consent in the future.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.

Iran is continuing to signal that it could at any point formally withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). If so this would certainly trigger alarm in the West, and might result in Israel launching a swift attack to 'prevent' the Islamic Republic from obtaining nukes.

Iran's Assembly of Experts - which is the nation's top clerical and advisory body connected to the Supreme Leader - has stated that withdrawing from the international treaty on nuclear weapons has become "an unavoidable necessity" and "a public and national demand," according to national broadcaster IRIB.

"In a statement issued on Thursday, the clerical body said the enemy’s repeated threats, particularly against Iran’s nuclear knowledge, showed there was no hope in the international bodies responsible for the issue," Al Jazeera writes of the statement.

"It said revising Iran’s defence doctrine, withdrawing from the NPT and creating the necessary deterrence had become a public and national demand, and expressed hope that officials would address it under the Supreme Leader’s guidance," the report adds.

"The assembly stopped short of directly calling for withdrawal, framing the issue as one that should be examined," Al Jazeera continues. 

The Assembly of Experts statement further notes that any final decision would rest with the supreme leader.

According some recent commentary London-based and Saudi-supported outlet Iran International, "Leaving the NPT during wartime would effectively mean pursuing a nuclear weapon, something Iran does not intend to do," Iranian diplomat Mohammad Mehdi Shahriari has described. "Withdrawal would only increase costs and further escalate the situation, he added."

But Iranian officials merely threatening pullout from the NPT remains a significant piece of leverage, at a moment when Washington seems 'stuck' in the Iran conflict and Hormuz crisis, and without an exit strategy.

A year ago, prior to Trump launching Operation Epic Fury, an adopted IAEA resolution charged that was Iran in breach of its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which Tehran is a formal signatory to.

Iran has frequently pointed out the obvious double standard in all of this- that Israel itself is armed with nukes and is not a signatory to the NPT.

This fact has long been an 'open secret' in Washington and among world leaders. But if the US government were to officially recognize Israel as a nuclear-armed power, it could trigger legal repercussions which would impact foreign aid to Israel.

September was not a terrible month for the US budget deficit; well it wasn't great either, but at just a deficit of $27 billion in the last month of fiscal 2026, at a time when the US traditionally burns through 9 cash digits every month, it was relatively forgettable. 

One can't say the same thing for October - the first month of fiscal 2027 - when all hell fiscal broke loose.

Let's start at the top: at 2pm today the US Treasury published the latest, October, monthly budget deficit data, which was also the first month of fiscal 2026. 

It was, in a word, a shitshow. Total US receipts for the month were $369 billion, a blistering 8.8% drop from the $404 billion a year ago, with individual income taxes accounting for just $186 billion, or about half of the total, and the bulk of the balance coming from Social Insurance and Retirement receipts of $131 billion. 

What was especially concerning, is that government receipts have tumbled from a double digit growth pace for much of the post-covid period to just 1.1% on a trailing 12 month YoY basis. This matters because virtually every time TTM spending has turned negative, the US was already in or about to enter a recession.

If receipts (i.e., taxes) were bad, then spending was an absolute debacle. In October, total outlays were $773 billion, a 12% deterioration from the $688.7 billion spent a year ago. On a trailing 6 month basis, the number was $649 billion, the highest on record outside of the covid meltdown, and even with covid, it will only take another $50 billion increase in spending to hit a new record high number.

Putting receipts and spending in context, a chart of the trailing 6 months of government revenue and spending shows that the two trendlines continue to diverge with spending on pace to surpass the covid all time high, even as government revenue remains largely unchanged over the past 5 years!

The difference between the two, is of course, the US budget deficit, which in October was shockingly massive $404 billion, a huge deterioration from both last October's $284 billion and certainly from September $27 billion deficit (which however was the result of some calendar discrepancies between the two months). As shown in the chart below, this was the highest October budget deficit on record...

... and since this was the first month of fiscal 2027, it was also the worst fiscal start to any year in US history!

What caused this shocking prolapse in the US fiscal picture in October? As noted above, tax receipts were bad (and about to push the US into a recession), but it was the record October surge in spending that was the culprit, and really juts two of the biggest drivers of government outlays. 

Number one: defense spending, which did something we can't quite explain. Maybe you will have some more success in explaining why last month US national defense spending looked like... this:

The second, and just as important driver for the deficit spike, is one we have been discussing for the past 4 years: interest on the US debt. At $115.5 billion it was the worst October on record...

... if not the worst month ever, due to seasonal patterns which suggest that December - normally the worst month of the year - will be an absolute disaster. 

One thing is clear: just as October was the worst start of any year for US deficit spending, so the chart below indicates that this year, the US will spend about $1.6 trillion (if not more) on gross interest.

Unfortunately, that means that by year-end 2027, interest expense will be roughly neck and neck with US Social Security Spending (which as everyone knows is now insolvent) as the largest government outlay.

Finally, putting it into context, at $1.4 trillion spent on gross interest in the past 12 months, not only was the absolute number a record, but when expressed as a the percentage of government revenue, it was 28.2%, also the highest on record.

In other words, more than 28 cents of every dollar collected in taxes now goes to pay just the interest on US debt.

And somehow, even with the Fed set to restart debt monetization in the next year, not to mention "NOT QE" later this month...

... people are still selling their gold, silver and crypto as if there is any hope that this time the Titanic won't sink. 

For three years the gold story was about who was buying. In 2026 it has become a story about where the metal sleeps at night.

On Tuesday the Monetary Authority of Singapore opened its national currency vault, with room for 500 tons of bullion, to foreign central banks and sovereign entities, and threw in a tax break for the wholesale gold trade to sweeten the deal. The launch lands three weeks after Bloomberg reported that wealthy American, European and Middle Eastern investors are already shipping their bars to the city-state, where privately held gold has grown 16-fold since 2014 to more than 800 tons!

None of this will surprise regular readers. We first wrote that Singapore was taking steps to become a global gold hub back in July 2014, when the grand total stored there was a rounding error, and we have spent much of this year documenting the great custody migration out of New York:

Well, some of it is now diffusing a lot further east than London.

The Rich Got There First

The Bloomberg piece is built around Gregor Gregersen, a German-born former bank data architect whose bullion business started under his bed and now occupies The Reserve, a six-story, 180,000-square-foot vault near Changi Airport with room for roughly 10% of the world's annual gold supply and 30% of its silver. His pitch to foreigners is simple: store it far from home.

The numbers suggest the pitch is working. According to estimates from bullion dealer J. Rotbart & Co. cited by Bloomberg, private gold holdings in Singapore topped 800 tons last year, with most of the increase coming from Europe, and the dealer expects more this year and next.

Who is sending it? Pretty much everyone who has read a newspaper lately:

• J. Rotbart says web inquiries from Western clients have tripled in a year, led by the US, then Canada, the UK and Australia, with the US fiscal deficit and political uncertainty the most cited worries.
• Indigo Precious Metals says demand from European and American high-net-worth clients is up about 25%.
• Precious-metals platform Gauld says about 40% of its European clients have either moved some gold from Switzerland to Singapore or picked Singapore for new purchases, with some rethinking Swiss neutrality after the freeze of sanctioned Russian assets.
• Nomura now offers physical custody in Singapore after requests from clients, including in the Middle East, while OCBC says holdings at its private bank are up more than 40% since the end of 2025, and that clients increasingly want to deal with Singapore entities instead of the US-based companies they used before.

What does a client who plans to leave gold untouched for 30 or 40 years look for in a country? Gregersen has a checklist:

People who want to store gold long-term – 30 or 40 years – usually like to find a country that is wealthy, has no impending pension system crisis, and a country which is defended. Singapore is like that.

Translation: the rich are now pricing in the possibility that Switzerland and the US are less safe than advertised. Singapore's two big private vaults can hold at least 2,200 tons between them, 500 at The Reserve and at least 1,700 at Le Freeport, whose basement vault was nearly full as of May.

One bit of napkin math before anyone gets carried away. Client gold in Gregersen's storage program has tripled since early 2020 to 8.6 tons, about 90% of it foreign-owned. Against 500 tons of gold capacity, that makes The Reserve less than 2% full. He told Bloomberg he built it to fill over decades. He was probably not kidding.

Now Comes The Sovereign Vault

Which brings us to this week. As CNBC reports, the new facility differs from The Reserve and Le Freeport in one key respect: it is run by the central bank itself, giving foreign monetary authorities a sovereign custodian in Asia to set alongside the Bank of England and the New York Fed. The World Gold Council's Shaokai Fan told CNBC a move like this is rare in the central banking world.

Reuters and the MAS fill in the details:

• The vault will hold reserves for foreign central banks, international financial institutions and sovereign entities, and the MAS will open gold custody accounts for selected Singapore-based bullion banks so the metal can actually be put to work.
• Some central banks have already expressed interest. Deputy Prime Minister (and MAS chairman) Gan Kim Yong would not say which, since the talks are confidential. (We have a few guesses.)
• From April 2027, tax relief on gold gets extended to wholesale services between institutions: vaulting, refining, recasting, assaying and broking.
• An SGX over-the-counter clearing system is due by year-end, with DBS, Deutsche Bank, ICBC Standard, JPMorgan, OCBC and UOB as clearing members. Live trading is expected by March 2027 and deliverable kilobar futures in the second quarter.

Here is how Gan framed it:

Developing our gold market is an extension of Singapore's role as a trusted financial centre.

He also stressed, as he did when he first unveiled the plan in June, that Singapore has no intention of replacing existing gold centers, which is exactly what one says while building the infrastructure to compete with them. Asia already accounts for roughly 70% of annual consumer gold demand, and the MAS was itself leading the record central bank buying spree in early 2023, so it knows the customer.

How big is 500 tons? At roughly $4,050 an ounce it is about $65BN of gold, or (napkin math again) some six months of global central bank buying at the pace Goldman currently estimates.

Goldman Saw The Storage Problem Coming

The timing is no accident. Back in August, Goldman's commodity team led by Lina Thomas published a note titled "Gold and Central Banks: Storage Dilemma; Buying Trend Picks Up" (available to pro subs), which we covered in "Goldman Asks: Where Will Central Banks Store Their Gold?" and again when the Dutch moved billions in gold out of the US in early September. The World Gold Council's survey still had the Bank of England as the preferred custodian for 57% of reserve managers, but Goldman found them increasingly spreading their bars around. The bank laid out why London and New York won in the first place, and what the catch is:

Gold held at the Bank of England or the Federal Reserve Bank of New York sits within the world's main gold settlement networks, providing immediate market access, access to dollar liquidity through swaps, and the ability to generate income through leasing. The drawback is that gold held abroad is not free from political risk, including the risk of freezing or restricted access (as in the case of Venezuela's gold reserves held at the Bank of England in 2018).

By October, in its "Central Bank Gold Purchasing Trend Remains Strong Through August" comment, Goldman said the official-sector debate was shifting "from whether to own gold to where to store it", and that the worry about reserve security and cross-country trust was spreading from emerging-market central banks to developed ones, a shift we discussed at the time. The evidence: foreign central bank gold at the New York Fed fell by 40 tonnes in August while custody holdings at the Bank of England rose by 46 tonnes, or as we put it, faith in Fed custody is in freefall.

Meanwhile, the buying that creates the storage problem has not slowed. Goldman's nowcast has central banks purchasing 79 tonnes in August, with China the largest identifiable buyer at 25 tonnes, and 85 tonnes a month on a three-month basis versus 17 before 2022.

And it is a concentrated club. SocGen's tally of the top five official buyers each year shows Poland, China, Kazakhstan and the Czechs turning up year after year, with the top five accounting for 88% of purchases so far in 2026. Every one of them has to put the metal somewhere.

Singapore is hardly the only one who noticed. China is building its own global vault network to promote the yuan and has already signed up Cambodia, Hong Kong's government is pushing hard to become a bullion storage and trading center, and Asia's producers have started keeping their metal at home. For a reserve manager who wants to be in Asia but maybe not inside China's legal system, the MAS vault is the obvious third option.

A Vault Is Not Yet A Market

CNBC's piece wonders whether Singapore has shown up late, and on raw numbers it is easy to see why. Singapore imported 171 tons of gold through August, up 44% on the year according to Trade Data Monitor. London, Bloomberg notes, has nearly 60 times that in storage, and Comex warehouses hold around 730 tons.

Metals Focus managing director Nikolas Kavalis made the point to CNBC: the sovereign vault is an important addition, but storage alone does not make a bullion market. What makes one is liquidity, meaning gold that can be lent, swapped and traded where it sits, which is the reason the custody accounts for bullion banks and the SGX clearing system matter more than the vault door.

The launch also comes at an awkward moment for the price. Gold is trading around $4,050, a long way below January's record just under $5,600, after speculators dumped $19.5BN of futures in five weeks and Goldman cut its target again last week, to $4,150 for year-end and $4,800 for end-2027, while keeping its assumption of 60 tonnes a month of central bank buying. Goldman's Rich Privorotsky has a theory for the weakness that ties straight back to the custody theme, as laid out in the desk's latest weekly commodity note (available to pro subs) and in our "Gold Has Become An Inverse Oil Trade" post:

My take is that gold has become an inverse oil trade. Central banks, particularly EM, have spent years accumulating gold as the new de-facto reserve currency. Higher energy bills forced reserve holders to tap that piggy bank or at minimum stop buying. As oil reverses, funding pressure eases and gold catches a bid.

In other words, the same reserve managers Singapore is courting were forced sellers when oil spiked, and should be buyers again as it fades. The Goldman commodity desk adds that its CTA model is close to max short, so the pain trade is probably higher, while materials specialist James McGeoch says most clients still have gold at the top of the list of things they want to own, only not today. The next test comes Friday, with October central bank buying data.

Trust Is The One Thing That Doesn't Fit In A Vault

So, is Singapore late? For trading, maybe. Loco London has a few centuries' head start and nobody at the LBMA is losing sleep over a clearing system that goes live in March.

For storage, we think the timing is close to perfect. The world's gold is being re-domiciled in real time: out of New York, around Switzerland, toward anywhere that has not frozen someone's reserves lately. A 500-ton vault holds about six months of central bank buying. The New York Fed is still sitting on roughly eleven of them in foreign-owned gold, and that pile shrinks every month.

Beating London was never the requirement. A small slice of what is leaving Manhattan, plus whatever nervous European money no longer trusts Zurich, would fill these vaults several times over. On current trends Singapore will get both, and with gold more than 25% below January's peak.

Gold, as always, goes where it is treated best. Right now that looks like a windowless building next to Changi Airport.

Much more in the full Goldman "Storage Dilemma", "Central Bank Gold Purchasing Trend Remains Strong Through August" and "Long-Term Constructive Gold, But Just Not Today" notes, all available to pro subs.

An incoming Democrat congressman is exposing the ugly consequences that he says party insiders warned him he could face if he refuses to fall in line behind House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY).

Rep.-elect Don Leonard (D-OH) said on Wednesday that senior Democrats warned him he could lose committee assignments, see his legislative agenda blocked and face serious obstacles to reelection if he withholds support for Jeffries' bid to become House speaker.

"It was actually a dinner with senior elected officials, and I let them know where my position was on the speaker, and they were offering very friendly advice with very stark consequences," Leonard told TMZ DC. "It wasn't in leadership. It wasn't their position to do it. It was just friendly advice from future colleagues."

Incoming Rep. Don Leonard - who has gone viral - tells me senior Democrats threatened him with "consequences" if he refuses to back Hakeem Jeffries for House Speaker pic.twitter.com/er3zzOJOQv

— Jacob Wasserman (@jacob_wass) November 11, 2026

When asked about the warnings, Leonard explained just how damaging the consequences could be.

"Committee assignments will be withheld. Ability to get legislation on the floor for votes will be difficult, and the ability to get support for re-election will be a difficult case to make," he said. "Welcome to Washington, D.C. I'm not shocked, but I'm disappointed."

Earlier this week, Leonard alleged that lawmakers warned that refusing to support Jeffries would mean "both making my life a living hell for the next two years here in Washington as well as being sure to lose my election in two years."

"It's starting to get real over here. I guess it must be Monday, "Leonard began. "Tonight I met with, we'll call them senior members of the Democratic House, who told me in no uncertain terms that the decision as to whether or not I support Jeffries, regardless of his willingness to speak with me and meet the interests of my constituents on a couple of key issues, number one, getting a constitutional amendment to end Citizens United, and number two, ending US support for the war in Iran and the country Israel that led us into it, that that would basically mean both making my life a living hell for the next two years here in Washington, as well as being sure to lose my election in two years."

Leonard compared the surreal scene to something straight out of a Hollywood movie.

"We kind of knew this stuff was coming," the incoming lawmaker continued. "It's part of the stuff you see in the movies. It's a whole 'nother thing when it's in person by people who actually care about you and are cheering for you, but expect you to wear the team jersey and be a good team player."

Despite the warnings, Leonard signaled he has no intention of backing down.

"We're searching our hearts tonight as to how we can reach Leader Jeffries and help him be a better speaker," he added. "At the end of the day, the big-D Democratic Party needs some little-d democracy, and I'm just a stubborn SOB, so we'll continue meeting with our fellow members of Congress and members-elect and trying to see if we can build support for what we're trying to do here."

Leonard won his Ohio congressional race earlier this month, defeating Republican incumbent Mike Carey and flipping the seat for Democrats.

***

Report: Leaked Letters Show Iran Quietly Buying Control Of Chinese Ports

Authored by Charles Kennedy via OilPrice,

Iran has been using oil terminals and storage facilities in China to ship its oil to its biggest buyer and keep sanctioned tankers operating despite the U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil exports, Iran International reported on Monday, citing top-level confidential correspondence of the former Iranian leaders.

Iran is using oil terminals and storage facilities in China to keep sanctioned tankers operating despite US restrictions, according to a confidential document obtained by Iran International and information from Oil Ministry sources.https://t.co/QBfYPObdNQ pic.twitter.com/7hBAKTQGlY

— Iran International English (@IranIntl_En) November 9, 2026

Ali Shamkhani, who was a political adviser to the former supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, discussed in letters to Hamid Bovard, the former head of the National Iranian Oil Company and currently the acting oil minister as of early October, that Iranian authorities had instructed intermediaries to continue using shadow fleet vessels to keep trade with China alive, according to the confidential letters that Iran International has obtained.

Both Ali Khamenei and Ali Shamkhani were killed during the first U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran in February.

Bovard, now acting oil minister, wrote in the correspondence that the Iranian Foreign Ministry had negotiated buying port facilities and oil terminals in China to establish a hub for sanctioned Iranian crude, per the documents obtained by Iran International.

Iran has also moved to secure long-term leases on large oil storage facilities in several Chinese locations.

The arrangement saw sanctioned vessels controlled by Ali Shamkhani's son Hossein Shamkhani transport Iranian oil to terminals and storage facilities Iran controls in China.

Iran has bought control of port facilities at three locations in China, and stakes in docks in the Shandong province, the home to the independent Chinese refiners, sources at the Iranian Oil Ministry told Iran International.

Even before the start of the Iran war, China sought to distance itself from trade with Iranian oil by rejecting requests from Tehran to boost import quotas for Chinese refiners, demanding even deeper discounts, and boosting crude oil imports from Venezuela, according to Iran International's sources.

Since the war began and the U.S. blockade in the Gulf of Oman choked off Iranian oil exports, Chinese independent refiners, the so-called teapots, have been looking for other cheap crude sources amid plunging Iranian volumes.

Publicly, Iran remains defiant and claims it will find ways to dodge the U.S. blockade.

But vessel-tracking services have estimated that Iran's oil exports have plunged since August. Iranian oil in floating storage has also been drained amid the U.S. Navy blockade.

"There's no more oil to discharge to China anymore," Kpler's head of crude oil analysis, Homayoun Falakshahi, said, as quoted by the Wall Street Journal last month.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier on Tuesday issued an investigative subpoena to the Democratic Socialists of America, saying his office is examining whether DSA accepted contributions or support "from foreign sources of concern, including the regimes in Cuba and China," and whether its fundraising from Florida donors has been "fully transparent and lawful."

In a video announcing the probe, Uthmeier said the subpoena was issued under Florida's Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act and the state's laws on the solicitation of funds. It covers "recent DSA delegations to Cuba, where national leaders and national political committee members met with Cuban government officials, as well as a delegation to China," he said, along with travel fund solicitations that "sought tens of thousands of dollars to cover costs for those trips and related activities involving Florida chapters."

Today my office issued a subpoena to the Democratic Socialists of America. We're examining foreign contributions - including from Cuba and China - tied to their delegations and travel fund solicitations.

FL law requires transparency. We will hold those who break the law accountable. pic.twitter.com/Xu8MUoDwZb

— Attorney General James Uthmeier (@AGJamesUthmeier) November 10, 2026

Uthmeier's office has not alleged that DSA actually took foreign money, and he said the subpoena "seeks the documents needed to determine compliance." The law he is leaning on is SB 700, signed in May 2025, which bars charities and fundraisers soliciting in Florida from accepting contributions from people tied to "foreign countries of concern," a list that includes Cuba and China. Knowing and willful violations carry criminal penalties, according to a Holland & Knight summary of the law. "We will not allow foreign adversaries to influence Florida through the back door of nonprofit fundraising," Uthmeier said.

A national DSA spokesperson told the Florida Phoenix that the group is "aware of the situation" and has "no comment at this time."

The subpoena landed a week after DSA-backed Democrat Ashley Herrmann ousted Republican incumbent Danny Alvarez in state House District 69 in Hillsborough County, which Creative Loafing called the first Democratic Socialist elected in Florida. 

Nationally, as we reported last week, DSA members now run America's two largest cities with Nithya Raman's declared the winner in Los Angeless. Uthmeier won his own race last week by less than 2 points.

DSA's Metro DC chapter wrote that "forty DSA members from across the country" traveled to Cuba in October 2025 to deliver aid, visit hospitals and schools, and "learn directly from Cuban workers, students, and officials," and its December reportback featured the Embassy of Cuba. The group pays for "DSA delegations abroad" through its Venceremos Fund, whose donation page says contributions "are not tax-deductible."

DSA members also joined the "Nuestra America" convoy to Cuba in March alongside Code Pink and Progressive International. The Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control has already sent administrative subpoenas over that trip to streamer Hasan Piker and Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin, seeking financial, logistical and communications records, Fox News reported in May.

Florida is not the first to look at those ties. As we reported in June, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sanctioned the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), Amistur Cuba and three other entities, calling ICAP a central node in a Cuban intelligence and influence network. Amistur is the Cuban agency that books political tours of the island.

On China, DSA meeting minutes reviewed by Newsweek, as we noted, recorded a New York activist telling the group's China Working Group in October 2025 that "China wants to interface with the DSA," and Chinese officials encouraging members to set up exchanges. Separately, the House Ways and Means Committee has subpoenaed three far-left groups that took more than $39 million tied to China-based financier Neville Roy Singham; DSA was not among them.

DSA's young backers, as we noted earlier this month, may not fully understand what it stands for, and its own records on who paid for the trips to Cuba and China now go to a Republican attorney general.

Via Middle East Eye

The US needs to stop treating Iran as if it is governed by "mad mullahs" and engage in dialogue with the Islamic Republic, which is emerging "stronger but different" from the US-Israeli war, a senior Iraqi Kurdish official said on Thursday.

"Iranians are often misunderstood in the West. This notion of mad mullahs is far from the truth," Bafel Talabani said at a Strategic Forum in the Iraqi Kurdistan city of Sulaymaniyah.

"We don't find it difficult talking to the Iranians," he said. "As an ally of Mr Trump and, strangely, an ally of the Iranians [I say] the mighty US can do it," he added.

Talabani leads the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which is the dominant political party in southeastern Iraqi Kurdistan. The PUK's administrative zone accounts for most of the region's long border with Iran.

The PUK has historically enjoyed close ties to Tehran, but that relationship came under strain earlier this year after US President Donald Trump and his advisers tried to recruit Talabani and other Kurdish leaders to support a Kurdish insurgency in Iran.

Talabani eventually decided not to intervene. A senior Kurdish official in Sulaymaniyah told Middle East Eye that the PUK warned Iranian opposition groups against launching attacks on Iran at the time, saying they were sure to fail. 

Tehran has been pressuring Iraqi Kurdistan to clamp down on Iranian Kurdish opposition groups. In a meeting in September with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, Talabani promised not to allow Iraqi Kurdistan to become "a haven for harming or threatening" the Islamic Republic.

Talabani said that Iran was emerging from the US-Israeli war "stronger, but different". Recounting a recent trip he made to Iran, he offered a very different assessment to that proposed by members of the Trump administration who have characterised Iran as on the verge of economic collapse.

"I thought I was in London," Talabani said, noting that "less then 50 percent of ladies and girls had scarves" and that restaurants were filled with young people dancing.

Iran not behind attack on Khor Mor gasfield

Iran launched strikes on Iranian opposition groups in Iraqi Kurdistan following the US-Israeli attack in February 2026.

Talabani was asked about a drone strike earlier this week on the Khor Mor gas field in the Sulaymaniyah Governorate. The field, operated by a UAE company, is one of the largest in Iraq and the strike has left almost 70 percent of Kurdistan without normal power supplies.

Talabani said he asked Iranian officials pointedly if they were behind the attack and he was assured they were not. "Iran has guaranteed me that it was not by their bidding or doing," he said. "The timing and methodology of the attack needs to be investigated very seriously." 

Iraqi Kurdistan has no air defence systems. The last US troops left Erbil, the region's capital, in September, completing a full US withdrawal from Iraq.

Some US lawmakers have since tried to advance the sale of air defence systems to Iraqi Kurdistan, but Talabani said that the semi-autonomous region was in a "grey area".

"There is a 'one Iraq' policy and the majority of these things need to happen with the OK of Baghdad," he said. "Either provide us with certain systems, or allow us to purchase our own. We are in a grey area."

Kurdish rift

Talabani spoke at a time when Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region is reeling from a major internal political rift.

Talabani withdrew his PUK, one of the two main political parties in the Kurdistan Regional Government, from the region's parliament this week. The PUK has traditionally been a rival of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which is led by the region’s president, Nechirvan Barzani.

Talabani called the rift the "single largest political crisis in the history of the Kurdistan region", saying that the region effectively had "two administrations".

The US envoy to Iraq and Syria, Tom Barrack, weighed into the rift, which has raised fears about a splintering of the province at a time of uncertainty over the region's security framework.

"The Barzanis, the Talabanis, have always been great friends of America. This is an Iraqi issue," Barrack said. "My advice is get over it."