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State news agency WAM quoted UAE Attorney General Hamad Saif Al Shamsi as saying the Flydubai Omani co-pilot accused of attacking the captain with a crash axe tried to seize control of the passenger jet bound for Israel and attempted to carry out a "terrorist attack."

Planning, attempted terrorist act behind flydubai flight FZ1073 incident: Attorney-General#WamNews https://t.co/OWxoZ9nWWR pic.twitter.com/JCE3NuGppa

— WAM English (@WAMNEWS_ENG) October 3, 2026

"Investigations into the incident involving flydubai flight FZ1073 found that the co-pilot had attempted to carry out a terrorist attack," Al Shamsi said.

BREAKING:

The Omani co-pilot who stabbed Captain Smit Machchhar and tried to crash Flydubai Flight FZ1073 on its way to Tel Aviv has been identified as Hamam Al Hamami.

Netanyahu stated today that it's becoming increasingly clear after the first interrogations that the attacker… pic.twitter.com/qXBS64D7W8

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 3, 2026

The aircraft operating flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv on Wednesday, about one week before the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks, plunged 18,000 feet during the attack as passengers and crew subdued the attacker.

Between 05:22:07 and 05:22:36 flight #FZ1073 dropped from 30,875 feet to 16,750 feet (-14,125 feet in just 29 seconds) pic.twitter.com/hHfnX7cKWI

— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) September 30, 2026

?????????????? UPDATE: Damage visible on FZ1073 after emergency landing

Images from Tabuk appear to show significant damage to the upper tail of flydubai flight FZ1073 following this morning’s extraordinary incident.

Reuters reports, citing an Israeli official, that a physical… pic.twitter.com/AXKCqt5Qjx

— DD Geopolitics (@DD_Geopolitics) September 30, 2026

The passenger jet, with 174 souls on board, diverted to Tabuk in northwestern Saudi Arabia for an emergency landing.

Al Shamsi said the investigation is under way "to uncover all the circumstances of the incident, its motives, and related connections, in addition to completing technical examinations and examining physical and digital evidence."

On Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel was investigating whether the co-pilot had acted under anyone's direction, warning that anyone involved in the terror plot would pay a "heavy price."

Flydubai halted all flights on the Israel route shortly after the terror plot was foiled, and Israel's El Al canceled its scheduled flights, stranding some Israelis in the UAE.

Two weeks after a cluster of Istanbul asset managers stopped honoring redemptions, triggering a market-wide circuit breaker and the liquidation of 131 funds held by some 455,758 Turkish retail investors, Ankara has unveiled its plan to make everyone whole. Or at least, to make everyone a little bit less un-whole.

As Bloomberg reports, Turkey will start payments to investors caught in the fund crisis. The Capital Markets Board (SPK) approved interim payments of up to 1 million lira (about $20,400) per eligible investor in funds run by Tera, Pusula, Atlas and Hedef, calculated on each investor's "net investment" as determined by the Central Securities Depository (MKK). Below a million lira, you get your money back; above it, you get a million and a place in the queue. Money market funds get paid first, the rest in descending order of investor count, with A1 Capital, Bulls and Pardus funds slotted in afterward. The interim payments are advances against whatever the liquidation ultimately recovers, which is a polite way of saying nobody knows yet.

Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek, meanwhile, insists that "we are not talking about a systemic problem," pointing out that public debt is just 22% of GDP and the budget deficit is "roughly half the developing country average." All true, and also not much consolation to the investor who, as Turkish Minute recounts, sold her Istanbul home before moving to Portugal, parked the proceeds in stock funds as an inflation hedge, and has watched her account fall ~90% while being unable to withdraw even that. "It is melting away before my eyes, and I can't do anything about it."

The "please give it back" account

The payouts are the boring part. The truly bizarre part is how Turkey - long the biggest banana in crowded bus of capital markets banana republics - plans to refill the pot.

Alongside the interim payments, the regulator announced the creation of "Voluntary Return Accounts" at Birlesik Fon Bankasi "for individuals seeking to return excessive profits obtained from pre-liquidation share sales." Proceeds will be funneled to the fund liquidation estates and on to Ziraat and Isbank for distribution to investors. A separate "General Share Refund Account" has been opened for anyone who would like to hand back profits from speculative trading in listed stocks, and a new fund inside the deposit insurer TMSF will receive assets later determined to be proceeds of crime (details here).

To summarize: Turkey's plan to compensate 455,000 losers is, in part, to ask the winners nicely.

Bloomberg's Eric Balchunas summed it up best: "Turkey wants investors who made a lot of money in market to gift excessive returns to the other investors who lost $20b."

Turkey wants investors who made a lot of money in market to gift excessive returns to the other investors who lost $20b in funds w ponzi like schemes that are being liquidated. Wow. pic.twitter.com/Aw7RVn6DJQ

— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) October 1, 2026

Which raises a question that every holder of Turkish assets, foreign ones included, will now be asking: if realized gains can be deemed "excessive" after the fact, at what point do they become yours?

For those who don't feel like volunteering, there is the stick, or rather a discounted stick: under a leniency provision, anyone who pays twice their gains (minimum 500,000 lira) within 15 days of a criminal complaint gets a reduced penalty. Note where that money goes: not to the stranded investors, but to the Treasury and Finance Ministry. Market manipulation as a revenue line.

So who exactly made the "excessive gains"?

Here the honor system runs into a few practical problems. According to a detailed timeline of the probe, Pusula chairman Muhammed Yariz wired roughly 2.89 billion lira (~$15 million) to Edmond de Rothschild in Switzerland on September 1, two weeks before his firm defaulted; Pusula Holding chairman Serdar Turhan sent ~1.2 billion lira (~€25 million) to the same Swiss bank on August 24. Both have since been arrested. One suspects the Birlesik Fon Bankasi "voluntary return" desk is not their first call.

Then there's Cengiz Avci, a major shareholder in Odine Solutions, a stock that rose 987% this year to a peak 366 billion lira valuation before collapsing 94%. Prosecutors allege he booked ~15 billion lira in gains and converted 12 billion lira (~$244 million) into cash. There is an arrest warrant. He "had not returned and was not located." Presumably the voluntary return form got lost in the mail.

And then there's the politics. Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya, deputy chair of Erdogan's ruling AKP and a former family minister, resigned after the opposition alleged she bought shares in shipbuilder Ozata Denizcilik, a navy contractor whose valuation was ramped to $5 billion (above Ford Otosan) while Tera's brokerage reportedly controlled 95% of its shares, for about €1.1 million in April and sold for €23.3 million just before the September 16 crash. Kaya has not directly addressed the allegations, which remain unproven in court. A 21x return in five months: if that isn't "excessive," we'd love to know what is.

It doesn't stop there. As Middle East Eye details, one Erdogan adviser sat on Tera Portfolio's board until January, another former presidential adviser stayed on until the crisis erupted, and an Ozata board member arrested this week is the son of a former banking regulator and the son-in-law of a sitting deputy finance minister. Tera chairman Emre Tezmen, arrested on charges of running a Ponzi-like scheme, previously served on the board of the MKK, the very central depository now tasked with calculating each investor's "net investment" for the payouts.

Freeze, unfreeze, arrest the tweeters

The enforcement response has been equally on-brand. On a Friday, the Justice Minister announced asset freezes on 46 companies, 18 funds and 42 individuals. By Sunday, the freezes on 45 companies and 19 funds were lifted after the CMB conducted "a new assessment," with Simsek explaining that "protecting investment, employment, production and exports was a priority." Restrictions on the 42 individuals remain. Meanwhile, prosecutors in Bakirkoy arrested 16 people for social media posts deemed to be market manipulation and blocked access to 246 accounts "spreading speculative panic." It's always the tweets.

Officials have now identified 217 suspects across 26 manipulated stocks, with 56 detained as of September 30. The mechanics of the scheme were hardly sophisticated: funds piled into illiquid, low-float stocks, and with nobody on the other side, prices went vertical. Prosecutors allege some prices were inflated nearly 100x. Then the regulator tightened concentration rules in late August, the funds were forced to sell into a market with no bid, and retail rushed for the exits on the TEFAS platform. The ones who got out first were, inevitably, the ones closest to the funds.

The numbers tell the story: Pusula's funds shrank from 115 billion lira to under 8 billion, with 107 billion lira withdrawn before the doors closed. Money market funds, supposedly the safe end of the spectrum, saw 456 billion lira pulled in a single week (from 2.14 trillion to 1.68 trillion). In other words, those who knew ran, and those who trusted a "state-supervised system," as one law graduate who invested with her mother put it, are now waiting for a $20,000 interim check.

What Goldman is telling clients

As the crisis erupted, Goldman's EM credit desk wrote on September 17 that the equity market's 6% plunge was due to the "near-collapse and redemption default of asset manager Pusula Portfoy, precipitated by the regulator's clampdown on concentrated 'fund-chain' positions," followed by Tera "failing to meet redemption requests." The central bank responded with bond buybacks (you know, "NOT QE"), bigger repo auctions and lower discount rates, while Simsek spent the day "defending current policy mix and committing not to deviate from the anti-inflation track despite elections." Turkey CDS widened 10bps intraday before closing +6.5bps; Turkish bank perps fell as much as 65 cents. 

We were more laconic: Turkey was getting "Leopolded" we reported late on Sept 16 when first news of the fund meltdown emerged.

Turkey getting Leopolded pic.twitter.com/vZYZqcPT24

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 17, 2026

By that weekend, Goldman's EM credit team was calling it a "systemic liquidity squeeze" in which "the liquidation of approximately $20 billion in local funds, sparked by redemption failures, dragged the BIST 100 down 6% and pushed external sovereign debt and CDS as much as 15bps wider midweek." Yet the bank's key takeaway was that "Turkey's move was technical rather than credit-driven, with a domestic fund liquidation transmitting into external debt before local buyers and short covering reversed most of it."

Goldman CEEMEA sales trader Ashwin Sharma went further, noting that the crackdown targeted a speculative boom that index provider MSCI had described as "co-ordinated trading," and that reining it in, "given threats of possible MSCI demotion (to Frontier)," was "a clear positive for me." His conclusion: "Despite near-term redemption-driven volatility, I continue to see Turkey as an attractive buy-on-weakness story," with banks pointing to further rate cuts and NIM expansion into 2027, and an energy price shock (Turkey is a net oil importer) the biggest risk. The bank's GIR EM strategists echoed the theme in their weekly kickstart, flagging Turkey's 5% weekly drop on "regulatory action on select investment funds."

The carry crowd hasn't left either. In a September 29 note, Goldman's EM SSA desk said Turkey remains a carry trade "GIR continues to favour and where we continue to see client allocation," with clients extending out the curve into paper like the EBRD 27.5% 2029s, which yield ~200bps above the 2027s. Then again, as of this morning, the bank's credit desk reported that in the Turkish corporate complex "risk was still available and offered with corps feeling particularly abandoned."

Which is, in a nutshell, the Turkish trade: the high-30s lira yields and the orthodox finance minister are real, and so is the system in which an AKP deputy chair allegedly makes 21x on a navy shipbuilder ramped by a fund whose chairman sat on the board of the securities depository, while the regulator's answer to the losers is a $20,000 advance and a bank account for the winners' conscience.

Been here before

Readers will recall the last time Turkish markets needed a marketwide trading halt, after the arrest of Erdogan's top rival Ekrem Imamoglu sent the lira to a record low ("All Hell Breaks Loose In Turkey"). And in May we noted that Turkey had sold nearly all its US Treasuries, dumping holdings from ~$16 billion to $1.8 billion alongside gold to defend the lira after the Middle East war erupted. The buffers, in other words, are thinner than the macro tables suggest.

As for the gated funds, the playbook should be familiar to anyone who followed the private credit redemption mess earlier this year: illiquid assets, daily liquidity promises, and a "screen price" that only exists until someone tries to sell. As one local analyst put it, whether the till "will have the money to pay it is unclear." The interim payments come out of what's left in the funds; the rest depends on the liquidators finding buyers for stocks that, by prosecutors' account, had been inflated as much as 100-fold, and on the winners volunteering to give back their winnings.

We wouldn't hold our breath. But we would watch the precedent: in Turkey, a realized gain is now only yours until the government decides it was excessive.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

The Green Party is going to war against language, having decided the words "mother" and "father" are no longer fit for its members.

Ahead of its conference in Brighton this weekend, Zack Polanski's party has circulated an 'Inclusive Terminology Guidance' telling activists to drop "mothers and fathers" for "parents and carers", and warning that the wrong vocabulary can create "unwelcoming or exclusionary" environments and feed into bullying and harassment under the party's own code of conduct.

The Telegraph reports that the document, already in use as equalities training, brands a run of ordinary English "unacceptable", then tells members what to say instead. 'Sexual preference' is out because it "implies that attraction is a choice". 'Transsexual' is out because it "does not encompass non-binary people". 'Homosexual' is discouraged for the same reason.

Green Party members have been told to replace terms such as "mothers and fathers" with gender-neutral terminology under new guidance on inclusive language ??https://t.co/s1W0OR75Ob pic.twitter.com/onYLGHsaFj

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) October 1, 2026

'Lunatic' and 'nutter' are non-compliant because they "reinforce negative stereotypes and stigma about mental health". 'Elderly', 'youngster', 'able-bodied', 'sex-change', 'female politician' and 'lady doctor' are all on the discouraged list. Gendered job titles go too: 'chair', not 'chairman'; 'police officer', not 'policeman'.

The race section is the same project in different clothes. Members are steered toward "global majority", described as an umbrella for people of Black, Asian, Brown, Indigenous and Latin American heritage, on the grounds that these groups are most of the world's population and are "often minoritised" in countries such as the UK.

'Brown' should be "used with caution," while "racially minoritised" is preferred because it "emphasises that minority status is created by social and power structures, rather than being inherent". "Black, Asian and minority ethnic" is to be handled carefully, because "many people are uncomfortable with grouping diverse experiences under a single label".

'The party wants to legalise drugs and ban mother and father. What planet are you on?

Martin Daubney and Ben Smoke discuss the 'inclusive terms' set out for the Green party conference. pic.twitter.com/g9Av86IsyM

— GB News (@GBNEWS) October 1, 2026

A section titled "What if I get it wrong?" tells members "it's OK to make mistakes from time to time", provided they are trying to be more "inclusive". The approved response is to apologise, thank the person who corrected you, and "adjust your language moving forward". Then the stick: "repeated or deliberate behaviour may be considered harassment, which is unlawful".

A Green Party spokesman told the Telegraph and the Daily Mail: "This is an existing and standard equalities training document, similar to those found in other organisations that also take equalities seriously. It is a guide and nothing else." The spokesman did not say when it was published.

The Free Speech Union called it "absolutely mental":

This is absolutely mental. When will this madness end?

The censorious Green Party is back to policing what we can and cannot say.

This time, rather than turning its sights on the press, it has published an Orwellian language guide telling delegates which words and phrases are... pic.twitter.com/sFKr2Tc7tp

— The Free Speech Union (@SpeechUnion) October 1, 2026

Conservative Party chairman Kevin Hollinrake said: "The Greens are obsessed with policing people's language and thoughts in the name of their increasingly bizarre crusade against ordinary Brits. Last week they were dictating who people spend time with and what jokes they make. Now they're attempting to prohibit perfectly normal words like 'mother' and 'father'."

He added, "This extraordinary obsession with censoring how people speak and behave in their everyday lives is made even more nonsensical by Polanski's inability to get a grip of the vile antisemitism within his own party." He added that Polanski should "look closer to home before lecturing others about what they can and cannot say."

JK Rowling answered in the only register the document deserves. "Speaking as the elderly mother of three youngsters, who hasn't had a sex change and knows many homosexuals, it is my able-bodied and sexually-preferred opinion that the Greens are turning into total nutters."

Speaking as the elderly mother of three youngsters, who hasn't had a sex change and knows many homosexuals, it is my able-bodied and sexually-preferred opinion that the Greens are turning into total nutters. pic.twitter.com/omMjs7Nxbb

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) October 1, 2026

None of this arrives in a vacuum. Polanski took leadership of the party in September 2025. Membership has since jumped from about 68,000 to 200,000 by March 2026, with 441 new councillors elected in May, a haul swollen by left-wing activists who left Labour under Sir Keir Starmer after Polanski put Palestinian activism and transgender rights ahead of anything resembling environmental policy.

A YouGov poll this week found Britons now rate the Greens "weak, out of touch, incompetent and serving their own interests", with net favourability sliding from plus five to minus 19 on his watch. He is standing in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election on 8 October, against Labour's Sagal Abdi-Wali.

The language guide is the internal version of positions the party has already taken in public. Last year, on Piers Morgan Uncensored, Polanski was asked if a woman can have a penis and answered yes. He called biological sex "not necessarily" binary, described gender as a "spectrum", and claimed he knew better than the UK Supreme Court, whose April 2025 ruling in For Women Scotland had defined sex under the Equality Act as biological sex at birth.

By March 2026 a leaked Green dossier was proposing a Department of Migration that would work with education authorities to "disseminate knowledge" in classrooms about "the situations from which those seeking asylum and resettling refugees are fleeing, and the need for and moral obligation of asylum and humanitarian protection."

In May, Scotland's loosened rules produced Green MSP Dr Q Manivannan, a transgender Tamil immigrant on a temporary student visa, without British citizenship or permanent residence.

The victory speech introduced "a transgender Tamil immigrant" whose pronouns are "they/them", and included the claim that "Transness is Blackness. Transness is womanhood. Transness is disability." A party that will not say mother and father had already elected someone for whom every category is interchangeable.

In July, two weeks after Reform's Ann Widdecombe was killed in a hammer attack at her Dartmoor home, Polanski shared an Instagram post of a man in a T-shirt bearing a guillotine and the line "We're only making plans for Nigel." Reform UK reported him to the Metropolitan Police for incitement. He later unshared it.

A party spokesman said he "unequivocally does not support this type of dangerous message" and had accepted the collaboration "without realising there was more to it." Nigel Farage said: "If I was to post anything as inciteful then I would expect to be arrested, and so should Polanski."

The same week as the language guide, the Mail on Sunday reported Green training that told members to police friends' jokes, log "what happened, including dates, times, locations", and audit the race of their closest friends to fight "affinity bias".

The attempt to retire "mother" and "father" flattens a biological relation into an administrative one.

The Communist Manifesto treats the charge of wanting to abolish the family as a boast as much as an accusation, and answers it by declaring that the bourgeois family vanishes with capital. Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, cast the monogamous household as a property arrangement whose job was to produce heirs, and looked forward to its supersession once private property was abolished.

Later Western Marxism kept the target and dropped the economics. The family became the workshop in which "oppressive" norms, sex roles, and authority were said to be reproduced.

Erasing words is how that is done without a manifesto. "Mother" names a woman who carried a child. "Father" names the man who fathered one. "Carer" names a function anyone can be assigned. Once the specific words are marked as harmful, the specific institution becomes harder to defend, because the defence has to be made in the replacement language.

This is exactly what George Orwell warned of in 1984.

A party that already tells children they owe a moral debt to asylum policy, that already treats sex as a spectrum, and that already elevates identity over citizenship, has every reason to want "mother" and "father" filed under unacceptable. The family is the rival loyalty. Marxism has always understood that. The Green guide is the HR version.

Now it's no longer just high-ranking Kremlin officials saying it, but Russian President Vladimir Putin has now directly weighed in amid the ongoing nuclear threat tit-for-tat involving European officials.

Speaking at the Valdai Discussion Club in Moscow on Thursday, he warned the Western allies to cease their escalation in Ukraine, stressing he's willing to use "all weapons" in the Russian arsenal in the scenario that Russia's exclave of Kaliningrad comes under attack.

"The drills in the Baltic Sea, following one another… Then the attempts to arrest our ships and vessels. All this is an escalation. And then we began to hear statements regarding the Kaliningrad region," Putin said.

"If it comes to direct attack against the Russian Federation, in this case on Kaliningrad and possibly some other territories, of course the issue of using all weapons in our country’s arsenal will inevitably and unavoidably emerge on the agenda. This is unavoidable," he asserted in a warning that includes nuclear weapons.

NATO held recent military drills near Kaliningrad which were broadly described as deterrence operations, which Putin referenced in the remarks.

Rhetoric has been running particularly hot over the exclave which is sandwiched between NATO members Poland and Lithuania all week, as Associated Press earlier described:

The warning sent to NATO echoed statements issued by several Russian embassies in Europe this week which said that Moscow has "information that NATO is preparing (an) air and naval blockade of Kaliningrad and Kaliningrad region."

The embassies in the U.K. and Ireland posted their statements on their Telegram channels, and the embassy in Belgium released it to the Tass news agency.

The ratcheting accusations from the European side have also centered on charges of a Russian sabotage campaign targeting the Baltics as well as Germany.

Moscow at the start of the week took the rare step of submitting a formal letter to NATO leadership in Brussels.

The letter accused NATO of an "unprecedented escalation of the military-political situation around Russia's region of Kaliningrad accompanied by highly provocative public statements by NATO Allies' officials."

"This dangerous and reckless course entails high risk of the outbreak of a direct armed conflict with the possibility of Russian strikes against decision-making centers of the alliance's member states right from the outset of the conflict," the letter said.

NATO was especially incensed and alarmed at this key line of Moscow's letter:

"Russia will be ready to use the entire arsenal of forces and capabilities at its disposal, including nuclear weapons, in order to defend its territory, should NATO countries undertake any attempt aimed at isolating the Kaliningrad region from the rest of the country."

Apparently this most recent tense back-and-forth over Kaliningrad was initially triggered by a television show which recently aired in the UK this month.

Preview of the provocative UK series The WarGame which started airing this month. The Kremlin has vehemently condemned it, and sees in it some clear messaging and an ominous threat:

Michael ‘The Gover’ Gove and ‘Bad Penny’ Mordaunt are loving their scripted roles in WarGames - just like the scripted parts they played for years in our Parliament.
This drama - documentary simulates an attack on the UK by Russia and was filmed 3 years ago.
Why do you think… pic.twitter.com/JYE8u5U8jH

— Andrew Bridgen (@ABridgen) September 22, 2026

Newsweek described, "The statement follows a miniseries aired by British broadcaster Sky News last week, The Wargame, which traces a hypothetical Russian attack on the U.K. and how the country might respond—including by authorizing operations against the Baltic territory of Kaliningrad."

The Department of War has put out a request for service members with "FPV experience" to participate in testing events called “Gauntlets” and fly Category 1 drones in field training exercises to accelerate drone development and prepare the US for the next conflict, where drones, robotics, and automated kill chains dominate the modern battlefield.

"Are you an FPV pilot? We want to hear from you!" DoW asked on X on Friday morning.

"The Drone Dominance Program is recruiting service members with FPV experience who would like to be considered as pilots for future Gauntlets and related efforts," the request said.

Are you an FPV pilot? We want to hear from you! The Drone Dominance Program is recruiting service members with FPV experience who would like to be considered as pilots for future Gauntlets and related efforts. Interested? Visit https://t.co/dlfuzlu2c0 to learn more: https://t.co/AyOAxjw9jt

— Department of War Innovation Unit (@DIU_x) October 2, 2026

The Drone Dominance Program is the DoW's answer to purchasing large quantities of drones across every category, from 1 to 5, and building out a domestic supply chain of components free from dependence on conflict areas and countries such as China, which can easily weaponize supply chains to hinder procurement.

Earlier this week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth revealed that Autonomous Warfare Command, dubbed "AutoWarCom," is set to accelerate the DoW's purchases across all categories of drones, robotics, and AI.

What's key is that drone procurement will be a massive part of the rearmament supercycle and provide tailwinds to drone companies, such as heavily shorted Ondas, whose Ultra drone could very well see ramped-up orders by the military as it's seen as an MQ-9 Reaper alternative for ISR missions. 

"Once we apply sustained budget to changed doctrine, we will outperform the world," said Owen West, a former Marine, assistant defense secretary, and Goldman Sachs trader who has been tasked with leading the DoW's Defense Innovation Unit. "And by snapping in AI, we will be ahead of the world, because we are the leaders in AI."

Authored by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano via LewRockwell.com,

Thomas Cromwell was the Lord Chancellor of England for much of the reign of King Henry VIII. He engineered the convictions and executions of many whom Henry wanted out of the way, including his two predecessors in office - one of whom was St. Thomas More - and even the king's second wife, Queen Anne.

When Cromwell's son Gregory, who became sickened as he watched his father devolving from counselor to monster, learned that an executioner for the queen had been sent for from France a week before her trial, he asked his father what the purpose of her trial was if the king had preordained the queen's guilt and prepaid the executioner. Cromwell replied that the king needed a jury to give the appearance of legitimacy to her conviction and prevent the public perception of "the tyranny of one man's opinion."

In America, we have a Constitution not only to prevent the perception but also the reality of the tyranny of one man's opinion. The Constitution's Fifth Amendment makes clear that if the government wants life, liberty or property, it cannot take it by executive command, but only by due process - a fair jury trial and all its constitutional protections; and Article I makes it clear that if the government wants war, it cannot commence it by executive command, but only by congressional declaration.

We have a Constitution also to assure the separation of powers in the federal government. Congress writes the laws, appropriates the taxpayers' money and funds borrowed in their names and declares war when the United States is in danger of imminent foreign threat. The president enforces the laws, spends money as Congress directs and wages the wars Congress has authorized. The judiciary decides what the Constitution and the laws mean and, if properly challenged, determines if the president and Congress or the states have exercised their duties lawfully and constitutionally.

The central constitutional question is not whether a president sincerely believes that his policies are necessary. It is whether the Constitution permits personal liberty and limited government to depend upon the opinion of one man. That is the danger of executive government without effective legislative and judicial checks.

A fair reading of the Constitution begins with a truism: Presidential power is not whatever the president believes it to be. It is only what the Constitution and laws actually confer.

Consider the administration's attacks on alleged drug-trafficking boats. President Donald Trump says he has directed military forces to strike narcotrafficking vessels and describes the operation as part of his campaign against fentanyl and cartels. But the constitutional question is separate from the president's characterization of the targets. A person suspected of being a drug trafficker - or even a mass murderer - does not thereby become condemned to death. Criminal guilt always requires accusation, evidence and adjudication according to law, before punishment.

These boat killings are unlawful extrajudicial executions. In the language all Americans can understand, they are murders.

The same principle applies to Iran. The Framers deliberately divided the war powers. Article I gives Congress the power to declare war, authorize military force, regulate the armed forces and control appropriations. Article II makes the president commander in chief. The distinction matters. The president commands forces; Congress determines where and under what circumstances the president does so.

Trump has openly declared an American blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and said that the United States controls which ships pass through it. He has also imposed sanctions which deny food, medicine and currency stability to millions of innocent Iranians. He even threatened to murder all Iranians - beyond the thousands he has already killed - if a peace agreement is not soon reached.

Those statements highlight what the Constitution was designed to prevent one individual from addressing alone: Whether the United States should wage military and economic hostilities against the population of another nation.

Congress has repeatedly resisted treating the Iran conflict as a matter solely for presidential discretion. Just two weeks ago, support for Trump's war failed to muster majorities in both houses of Congress.

Nor can the president's personal assessment of Iran's nuclear intentions settle the matter. In 2018, his State Department's compliance report said Iran was fulfilling its nuclear-related non-proliferation commitments and U.S. intelligence had assessed with high confidence that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

In 2020, his State Department again said that Iran was not then engaged in key activities associated with designing and developing a nuclear weapon. In 2025, his Director of National Intelligence testified that the entire U.S. intelligence community continued to assess that Iran was not building nuclear weapons.

Those facts alone establish something constitutionally important: The president's personal belief - whether informed or uninformed - is not evidence or law or a substitute for congressional authorization.

The same textual principle reaches domestic spending and taxation. Article I provides that only Congress can impose taxes, and money may be drawn from the Treasury only pursuant to appropriations made by law. Even though the Supreme Court has invalidated Trump's tariffs, he continues to impose them. Even though Congress has not authorized funds for Trump's vanity projects, he continues to spend tax dollars on them.

The Constitution does not grant any branch of government carte blanche. It has separated powers precisely because legislators, presidents and judges can all succumb to the corruption of power - and can all be wrong.

That is the deeper meaning of the tyranny of one man's opinion. The danger is not merely that one president might be wrong. It is that a constitutional system becomes meaningless if one man's conclusions about war, crime, taxation, spending, foreign threats or national security become the sole basis for government actions - particularly actions that kill innocents.

The Founders separated the sword from the purse and divided governmental power because they understood a truism: Personal liberty and limited government cannot long survive when entrusted to one man's opinion.

Earlier this month, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman fueled speculation about the agency's high-speed flight research plans by unveiling a mysterious aircraft silhouette on a slide titled "Rebuilding our X-plane portfolio."

Asked whether the image on the slide depicted the famed SR-71 Blackbird, Isaacman denied it was a Blackbird but signaled renewed ambitions for high-altitude, high-speed flight, saying NASA was getting back into the business of "flying high and fast again."

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman showed a mysterious aircraft during the portion of his All-In Summit presentation on rebuilding NASA’s X-plane portfolio ??

• Isaacman showed a dark silhouette resembling a next-generation SR-71 Blackbird while discussing 'radical airframe and… pic.twitter.com/VNEDExk8K0

— Latest in space (@latestinspace) September 22, 2026

This brings us to an Aviation Week report saying NASA is working to return a Blackbird to flight after nearly three decades in retirement.

The agency has approached retired Blackbird engineers about restoring Tail No. 844, a 59-year-old aircraft removed earlier this year from an outdoor display at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in California.

The aircraft was moved into a former Space Shuttle hangar, where crews have been working on it, former NASA and Air Force test engineer Mike Relja revealed to the aviation news website. 

However, as the outlet shared, there is one major problem:

The Air Force and NASA destroyed a $600 million supply of spare parts for the Blackbird fleet in 2007. The move came long after it seemed unlikely, if not impossible, that an SR-71A would return to operational service.

That decision could lead to significant restart costs. In addition to all of the consumable spares that must be in regular supply, NASA would need to restore access to the Blackbird's unique JP-7 fuel blend, the triethylborane ignition chemical, engine oil and hydraulic fluids, Relja adds. A hodgepodge of bespoke ground equipment also no longer exists, leaving the current effort without vital, if unheralded, pieces of equipment.

"To raise the wing, you need a cart," he says. "To get the engine out, you need a cart. You need equipment to pull the [engine] spikes, pull the [ejection] seat. All that stuff is gone."

When Relja raised all of these issues with Ash, the NASA manager assured him it would not be a problem, without going into details about their solutions.

"Every time I threw one of these things out there, he says, 'Oh, engineering will take care of that [and] engineering will take care of that,'" Relja recalls.

At the same time, he does not dismiss a return to flight as impossible, especially if NASA has enough resources to make it achievable.

"If you got a ton of money, maybe you can make it happen," he says. "They went to the Moon, you know."

Why NASA wants to restore the SR-71 to flightworthy status remains unclear. Reports over the years have pointed to Lockheed Martin's development of the SR-72, dubbed the "Son of Blackbird," for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. Yet no flight tests have been publicly confirmed.