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Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:30:00 +0000 'Free Stuff' In Norway Still Costs Half Of Average Pay
'Free Stuff' In Norway Still Costs Half Of Average Pay
'Free Stuff' In Norway Still Costs Half Of Average Pay
Authored by Joakim Book via TheDailyEconomy.org,
Every few years, Americans rediscover Scandinavia.
Someone visits Norway or Denmark, returns dazzled and envious of parental leave and universal childcare, and asks why America refuses to copy what obviously works. On the day dedicated to celebrating America, Nicholas Kristof, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, wrote for The New York Times that America is so great that, in fact, it should be more like Norway. If American companies can pay high wages and generous benefits to workers there, Kristof observed, they could do so in New York, too.
If only America were willing to embrace a little more social democracy and bigger government, this popular and recurring story goes, perhaps it could enjoy the same prosperity and flourishing that Norway does — and have its population also routinely rank among the happiest on the planet.
I was born and raised in one Nordic country, have worked in another, and for the last six years have lived in a third, so I’m fairly familiar with our way of life. I’ve also spent much time in America, stunned and enamored of the way things are in the vast, diverse, and unruly union of states. Europeans are simultaneously fascinated and bewildered by America.
Plenty of things are amazing about these United States, and quite a few things awful about the Nordics; I suspect American intellectuals, dreaming about Norway without understanding its nature and tradeoffs, overlook both.
“You Want Security, Health Care and the American Dream? Look to Scandinavia” Norwegian workers certainly have higher wages than those in many European countries, including those of its fellow Scandinavians. Hotel cleaners, retail clerks, and construction workers often earn salaries that surprise visiting Americans. Thanks to Baumol’s cost disease , decades of well-managed petroleum wealth have pushed up industrial and service wages.
The first thing an American professional moving to Norway would notice isn’t the generous parental leave , but the great loss of disposable income and material well-being. Norwegians households average 30 percent less disposable income than those the US, and the cost of everyday items is much higher .
The Scandinavian bargain might look like free services, but it as tradeoff: more public goods, fewer private goods.
When American politicians or intellectuals promise Nordic welfare states, most people imagine this happening automatically or by taxing the rich , and everybody benefits. That’s not the case. The real Nordic model taxes earners more (45 percent in Denmark, 40 in Norway, 41 in Sweden, compared to 25 percent in the United States) and charging flat value added tax (VAT). Broad welfare states require broad tax bases; Nordic welfare states are financed not by billionaires but by ordinary workers. The “free” benefits are bought with invasive and regressive consumption taxes (up to 25 percent), payroll taxes , and income taxes that reach well that begin after just $10,000 (the first $16,000 is tax free in the US).
An American professional, pocketing the median earnings$65,000 , would pay over $17,000 in Norwegian income taxes (compared to about $5,000 per the IRS calculator, naturally subject to state taxes and various deductions), with the employer forced to chip in another $9,200 for the privilege of merely hiring her. From what’s left over, she faces a high cost of living and sales taxes between 11 percent and 25 percent.
Were she in Sweden, a much poorer country with wages well below Norway’s, our middle-of-the-road American professional would land herself in the top 20 percent of earners — though not yet triggering the top 53 percent (or 64 percent) marginal tax rates .
For the Tax Foundation, Cristina Enach summarized , “In 2024, Denmark’s tax-to-GDP ratio was 45.2 percent, Norway’s was 40.2 percent, and Sweden’s was 41.4 percent. This compares to a ratio of 25.6 percent in the United States.”
Some of that difference is accounted for by healthcare spending (private, not government) and pension contributions (401(k) or other retirement accounts) and other personalized options. The Nordics give you one option: the state.
In return, yes, our hypothetical expat would receive subsidized childcare, education, paid time off, and health care. Those services would be of dubious quality, with waiting times stretching into months even for life-threatening conditions. For some, that’s a trade worth making, but it’s not obviously superior , as economist Noah Smith concluded in his comparison a few months ago.
Inequality is indeed lower in Norway, where a person in the top 10 percent earns just three times as much as a person in the bottom 10 percent. That means there’s less reason to strive, less room to grow. Looking to the future, investments in growth , employment , and AI-fueled opportunities are far more attractive stateside than in stagnating Scandinavia. Suppressing growth at the top has suppressed everyone’s potential.
The Norwegian Story Isn’t the Nordic Story The gap between the average person’s wellbeing in America and that of almost all European countries has widened dramatically over the past three decades. In income per capita, the United States has steadily pulled away from Europe over the last thirty years. The United States’ average income now exceeds every EU member except Luxembourg and Ireland. Citizens of fourteen EU nations earn less on average than residents of even the poorest state: Mississippi, and the EU as a whole ranks between Oklahoma and Maine.
Joseph Sternberg’s opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year is illustrative: both Americans and Europeans are shocked when they learn how much materially better off America is. “Politically, bliss is ignorance,” concluded Sternberg. “European welfare states, by creating relatively comfortable lives for voters, conceal the full extent of Europe’s prosperity gap.”
Norway is an affluent country by European standards, but only average compared to America as a whole. Rough figures indicate that Americans, on average, enjoy material economic abundance on par with Iceland and Norway , but are 20 percent to 60 percent better off than the other Nordics. (The difference between the economic outliers and the other Nordics is the difference between New York State and Michigan .) While there are nuances in life, politics, and economics between the five Nordic countries, it’s not like the tax rates, labor economics, public schooling, the overall welfare state, or the generosity of parental leave are that different.
It’s no accident that Kristof reported from Norway ; had he run this comparison with Sweden or Finland, the economic outcome would have been so unacceptably low that few Americans would be persuaded by the promise. People in the Norwegian and Icelandic success stories are significantly richer than the other Nordics. Even adjusting for purchasing-power-parity numbers via the University of Groningen-Penn World Table data for 2023, Americans are still a comfortable 15-20 percent richer than most Scandinavians.
It’s Impossible Anyway, So Why Are We Dreaming? The most immediate sticking point to inflated dreams about the Nordics is that nobody has figured out a way to effectively translate and recreate social and economic institutions elsewhere
Institutions emerge from particular and path-dependent histories. They’re not IKEA furniture to merely ship across an ocean and assemble at home. Academic or political observers often make the mistake of thinking you can just isolate a few desirable behaviors or economic institutions, retrofit them onto America, and effortlessly create better lives here.
Plus, America has long tolerated — indeed celebrated — a remarkable degree of eccentricity and ambition . Americans start improbable companies in garages , and they love their “weirdos .” When they do things, they (over)do them properly — SpaceX. College football. Time Square. Las Vegas. Whatever you’re interested in or passionate about, some all-American oddball has built a community for that. It’s a nation of inventors and obsessive animal lovers . They build Burning Man in the desert and whole cities at sea . Their wide-open spaces connect a web of places-as peoples-as-philosophies: Hollywood, elite universities, Silicon Valley and Broadway, Nashville and Detroit, Amish meeting houses and evangelical megachurches, Hindu temples and Highland games from coast to coast. Our great hybrid culture thrives on liberty, not just lower taxes. Our cultural inheritance is the result of having astonishingly many different attempts thrown at the American wall to see what sticks.
The Nordics don’t have that. With the recent exception of fintech and startup wonders (riding on an early, high-tech boom from the ‘90s), trying new, eccentric things in those cold lands isn’t exactly welcome. The Scandinavian idea of Jantelagen
The political equilibrium keeping Scandinavia afloat was, until recently, a mostly homogenous population on sparsely populated lands eerily willing to subjugate individual preferences and quirks to common, collective rules. America stands out in the exact opposite way: letting 15 times as many people pursue radically different lifestyles and individual ambitions with cheerful respect, but little regard for whether the neighbors approve.
Even if it were possible to transplant Norwegian economic and political institutions onto America, how can we be confident we won’t have a Swedish-level economic debacle instead of the wealthy, comfortable Norway a social reformer might dream of?
We can admire and learn from Scandinavian countries using the “Nordic Model,” which have achieved robust social programs without sacrificing too much in the way of economic prosperity. That balance is fragile, and might not work forever: immigration troubles , stagnating growth , and an overbearing regulatory state are exposing the cracks.
Scandinavia has built wildly successful societies for a few million very similar-minded people. But the United States has built something more impressive: a vast, messy republic of economic and social flourishing where hundreds of millions of people peacefully pursue wildly different visions of a good life.
Becoming more like Norway means becoming less American, with less of the opportunity, ingenuity , and the entrepreneurship that made America great.
Tyler Durden Wed, 07/29/2026 - 03:30 Close Wed, 29 Jul 2026 06:45:00 +0000 Russia Answers Drone Attacks With War On Ukrainian Ports, Maritime Shipping
Russia Answers Drone Attacks With War On Ukrainian Ports, Maritime Shipping
The Russian Defense Ministry (MoD) has an 'answer' to Ukraine's recent long-range drone attacks, which have wreaked havoc on oil production and most recentl
Read more.....
Russia Answers Drone Attacks With War On Ukrainian Ports, Maritime Shipping
The Russian Defense Ministry (MoD) has an 'answer' to Ukraine's recent long-range drone attacks, which have wreaked havoc on oil production and most recently online retailers and manufacturing . Ukraine has also been attacking Russian ships elsewhere in the Black Sea as well as Sea of Azov.
The MoD has announced a fresh wave of strikes targeting multiple Ukrainian port installations and Black Sea shipping targets , which represents a sharp escalation in Moscow's ongoing campaign to choke off regional logistics, and in order to further 'punish' Ukraine.
Golden Leo seen partially submerged offshore Odesa, July 26. Via the Odesa Military Administration While Ukraine's repeat large drone waves on the Moscow region have driven headlines, much less attention has been paid to the emerging and renewed Black Sea war .
Moscow seeks to sever military supply routes and disrupt arms shipments bound for Ukraine, but this has also obviously resulted in damaged and sunken tankers, auxiliary vessels, and even deaths of civilian bystanders among international shipping crew.
Russia's military has said that from the weekend through Monday, key logistics hubs of Odessa, Chernomorsk, and Port of Mykolaiv (Nikolayev) have been hit - with the latter site seeing a docked cargo vessel receiving a direct strike.
All of this comes after local authorities in Odessa confirmed Sunday that a foreign-flagged cargo ship, which some reports have identified as the Guinea-Bissau-flagged Golden Leo, capsized and sank near the coast after taking heavy damage from a Russian attack over a week ago .
According to The Maritime Executive
A small cargo ship that was badly damaged in a Russian strike off Odesa has gone down, according to Ukrainian authorities. The small vessel had absorbed multiple hits, and it sank after six days of progressive flooding .
On July 19, three Russian cruise missiles hit the Turkish-operated, Guinea-Bissau-flagged ship Golden Leo off the coast of Odesa. The vessel was outbound with a load of corn at the time of the strike; Russia has been targeting Ukraine's grain export sector in retaliation for strikes on Russian logistics and energy infrastructure .
Video of the slowly sinking ship had gone viral over the last several days, and the Russian attack killed ten people - and with eight crew members later having to be rescued.
At least two of the projectiles that hit the vessel were anti-ship missiles, triggering a massive fire before it went under.
Russia has come under international condemnation for these attacks, especially from India given the rising numbers of Indian crew members killed or injured.
Russian vessels with civilian crew have also been coming under attack from Ukraine in the same region...
Sea war has also lately expanded into the Caspian, potentially linking the Ukraine and Iran conflicts...
But the Kremlin has shot back, saying it is Ukraine which is unleashing "indiscriminate terrorist attacks against civilian infrastructure" through its constant drone attacks.
Tyler Durden Wed, 07/29/2026 - 02:45 Close Wed, 29 Jul 2026 06:00:00 +0000 How Does A Political Party Leader Survive This?
How Does A Political Party Leader Survive This?
How Does A Political Party Leader Survive This?
Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News ,
Far left UK Green Party leader Zack Polanski has caused uproar by sharing an Instagram post featuring a man in a T-shirt depicting a guillotine next to the words "We're only making plans for Nigel." The clear target was Reform UK leader Nigel Farage.
This lands just two weeks after Reform's Ann Widdecombe was beaten to death with a hammer in her own home.
Reform has reported Polanski to the Metropolitan Police for incitement to murder. The Met says it is conducting enquiries.
The image formed part of a carousel of photos from a Green Party event. Polanski, who has more than 700,000 Instagram followers, accepted a collaboration request. Once the specific frame was flagged, he unshared it.
A Green Party spokesman said he "unequivocally does not support this type of dangerous message" and claimed he had accepted the post "without realising there was more to it than he had seen." The same spokesman called the T-shirt "clearly in poor taste" while noting Polanski himself has received threats.
Nigel Farage shared a screenshot and stated the obvious double standard: "This is what Zack Polanski has just posted on his Instagram. If I was to post anything as inciteful then I would expect to be arrested, and so should Polanski."
Reform's home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf posted a video reaction expressing disbelief at the sequence of events.
The Metropolitan Police confirmed: "Earlier today, we received a third-party report relating to an image shared on social media. We take reports of this nature extremely seriously, and officers are conducting enquiries into the matter."
Is the enquiry was serious or just purely performative?
Reform has also indicated it will refer Polanski to the Greater London Authority monitoring officer, given his elected role there.
The timing is not abstract. Ann Widdecombe, 78, Reform's immigration and justice spokeswoman and a long-serving former Conservative minister, was found dead at her remote Dartmoor home on 9 July.
Prosecutors told a court she sustained 21 blows to the head from a hammer in what was described as a planned and targeted attack. A man has been charged with her murder.
The killing immediately produced open celebration among sections of the left online, including on platforms that market themselves as more "kind" alternatives to mainstream social media. Users treated the death of an elderly woman for her politics as a punchline or a form of progress.
VIDEO
VIDEO
Against this backdrop, Polanski's post landed like petrol on dry grass.
Jack Hadfield noted the contrast with previous cases of social-media speech:
Alex Armstrong stressed equal application:
Nioh Berg highlighted the mechanics of Instagram collaboration posts. Accepting a collaboration requires a deliberate step; the image was visible.
Will we see yet another example of two tier policing in the UK?
Alex Phillips observed the media asymmetry:
Susan Hall of the London Assembly noted that this rhetoric is unacceptable in any context.
Polanski leads the same Green Party that has spent years elevating radical identity politics above basic national standards. In May, we documented the election of a transgender Tamil immigrant on a temporary student visa - with no British citizenship or permanent residency - as a Green MSP in Scotland.
The party's record under Polanski includes candidates investigated for antisemitism, open rejection of biological reality, and a consistent prioritisation of ideological purity over ordinary voters.
The culture that normalises such figures is the same culture that treats a guillotine graphic aimed at a political rival as an unfortunate oversight.
British politics has already seen two sitting MPs murdered in recent memory - Jo Cox and David Amess - plus the hammer killing of Widdecombe. Security concerns for public figures are no longer theoretical.
Farage has repeatedly described himself as among the most physically and verbally attacked politicians of the modern era. Polanski has previously labelled Farage a "fascist" and a "grifter." The language of existential threat has become casual on one side of the spectrum while the same side demands maximum protection and sensitivity for its own.
Two-tier enforcement remains the live issue. Cases involving speech from the right have produced arrests, charges, and in some instances custody. Equivalent or stronger material from the left has frequently been waved away as "poor taste," "satire," or an unfortunate oversight.
The Met's statement that it takes such reports "extremely seriously" will be tested by whether any meaningful action follows or whether the file quietly closes once the news cycle moves on.
A political party leader is not an anonymous activist. He is a public figure with institutional reach, elected positions, and a platform that amplifies whatever he platforms.
Accepting a collaboration that places a beheading graphic of a rival in front of three-quarters of a million followers is not a private lapse. It is a public act. Claiming not to have noticed the content after the fact does not restore the credibility that was spent.
The response from the Green Party has been damage control rather than unambiguous rejection of the underlying culture that makes such imagery thinkable.
Either the rules on incitement and threats apply evenly, or they exist solely to police one side. If Polanski remains leader of the Green Party after this, it confirms the far left's extremist stance and proves that only those who oppose it will be targeted and punished.
Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch . Follow us on X @ModernityNews .
Tyler Durden Wed, 07/29/2026 - 02:00 Close Wed, 29 Jul 2026 03:25:00 +0000 The War's Back Is Broken
The War's Back Is Broken
The War's Back Is Broken
Authored by Alastair Crooke
Trump ordered the US military not to carry out new strikes on Iran Friday night, despite approving earlier a "Gates of Hell massive attack" on Iran. The US has now requested a new temporary ceasefire with Iran and is seeking a return to the collapsed and suspended MoU, with discussions to include Yemen, and with Trump seeking to make AnsarAllah a party to the negotiations.
Clearly Trump is angry, and fears that that the war is consuming his Presidency (and his legacy) . Iran comprehensively rejected all negotiations throughout this last week and confirmed it will not start negotiations under any circumstances. Put simply, why would Iran consent to give the US time to regroup and rearm before launching another round of strikes on Iran when it has the US “on the run.”
A return to the MoU whose credibility Trump repeatedly has shredded? Unlikely.
Will Schryver notes that rumors are swirling that the Pentagon is pressuring Trump to call off the war with Iran because the US has nearly exhausted its stockpiles of air-defence interceptors and stand-off strike missiles. The President’s top aides are also uneasy about the prospect of a widening war in the Middle East, the alienation of key Gulf allies vulnerable to further Iranian attack, and the coming energy crunch. “Few if any in Mr. Trump’s inner circle believed the plan to escalate was wise, said the two people briefed,” the New York Times reports .
It seems too that jiggery-pokery over the exact fuel supply situation in the US may have played a part in Trump’s backtrack. Larry Johnson reports that –
A brief prepared by Karl Miller investigates how the US military’s covert fuel procurement and export operations are depleting the nation’s diesel and jet fuel reserves, particularly during a period when domestic stocks are already critically low.
In gist, Miller says that –
much of this (covert) fuel export is routed through opaque channels, such as the Rotterdam trans-shipment hub, where the final military or foreign allocation is not publicly reconciled, leaving the American economy exposed to shortage risks – whilst military and foreign operations – ‘notably Israel’ – receive priority access.
This report by Miller seems to connect to the US authorities’ open manipulation of oil benchmarks designed to convince markets that there is no danger of fuel shortages arising from the ongoing emergency release from the SPR (Strategic Petroleum Reserves) of 172 million barrels that was initiated to counter supply shocks from the conflict with Iran.
Whilst the statuary security floor is 250 million barrels (the current level is around 300), nonetheless the narrative is being promoted that the drawdown can go even further (to 70 mbpd). But can it? What is the minimum level the strategic oil reserves can go to? It is more complicated than just one big vat of crude that has a specific level. The SPR is composed of many caverns, and contains different types of crude oil, that are being drawn down at different rates, with some caverns likely to collapse if drained too far . In short, nobody knows how far is too far. It’s all guesswork.
With the back broken to Trump’s military assault the only path back to negotiations would be to offer front-loaded real concessions . But even were Trump to do this, would he be believed? And can Trump’s mental state sustain such implied humiliation?
The main obstacle on the path back to negotiations with Iran is that he and his inner circle understand Iran back-to-front.
They aver to believe that they are dealing with an intransigent and hardline leadership, whilst Iranians as a whole long for an exit.
This is wrong; it is the other way around. It is the leadership that is pragmatic, and it is “the street” that is overall more hard-line and demands vengeance . And demands to know why there should be negotiations at all.
Then again, Team Trump and his Fox News cheerleaders have slipped from the earlier US vision of itself as a redeemer nation into a radical Manichaean “characterization of itself,” Professor Michael Vlahos writes , in which –
American ‘good news’ has been replaced by the ever-present spectre of Evil and the threat of force. The holy words, Freedom and Democracy, while still chanted, have become a hollow mantra. The American ‘gospel”’no longer preaches about bringing redemption and expiation: it is now concerned with enforcement and punishment . The volte-face came in an instant, on 9/11 and with Guantanamo.
The problem then centers on attitude: How is it possible to negotiate or talk to the embodiment of evil (as Trump terms the Iranians)? It isn’t possible, of course. That was the point to casting enemies in such dark terms. It precludes true mediation . It precludes a solution that can be viewed as the elevation to power for “one of the most evil people in history,” leading a “gang of bloodthirsty thugs.” It distils policy to the search for dominance over the “otherness.”
The West exhibits one particular way of thinking that it deems to represent the essence of that which is Human. This mode of thinking (often termed Apollonian) links to Patriarchy, law, and vertical top-to-bottom secular, rational, mechanistic thinking. It offers little room for “betweenness.” Things are either “A” or “non-A.”
However, another sphere (often termed the Dionysian) expresses the energetic duality in both nature and in the human – male and female; order and exuberant transgression; and of rectitude and degeneracy. They form the poles within consciousness that both co-inhere in us, and that co-constitute each other. (Dionysian logos may be viewed perhaps as the shadow, or even of the revolt against Apollo).
And then there is Persephone (the underside to the Dionysian “shadow”) expressing the chthonic, feminine existence. Here there is no male pole, but only a goddess radiating earthiness and the female principle of reproduction, the process of growth and of caring, and of underworld knowledge (called intuition) – symbolizing the cyclical Life of Aphrodite, decay, death and ultimate renewal.
Consciousness however, mostly expresses the human quality from one particular orientation. Nonetheless, all civilizations draw from the full diversity of such components to consciousness that – one way or another – respond to a particular civilization.
To think in one culture is to think in one way; however to belong to a different culture, a different ethnic group, a different religion – means that thinking will differ. Yet we all remain human.
So the imperial hubris of Trump is beginning to face the fact that he will find it hard – possibly impossible – to find a solution to the Middle East, because to see the world from the purely Apollonian perspective is essentially male and exclusivist and fails to understand “otherness”; but rather relies on exceptional privilege. It simply does not – and cannot – recognize a plurality of minds .
The US has lost the war. By adopting such uncompromising Manichaean language, Trump effectively has severed himself from any prospective diplomatic solution . By widening the war (Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq) he has severely complicated any diplomatic track. All elements are interrelated, yet they also have separate agendas. Thus a solution involves a complex matrix of issues, rather than a binary dispute between the US and Iran alone . The US ultimately will have to capitulate, with the result that Iran becomes a regional power (strengthening Russia and China), whilst the Region slowly will come to terms with this new West Asian reality.
Tyler Durden Tue, 07/28/2026 - 23:25 Close Wed, 29 Jul 2026 03:00:00 +0000 Los Angeles Is Painting Its Streets To Fight Heat Waves
Los Angeles Is Painting Its Streets To Fight Heat Waves
Researchers found that coating more than 700,000 square feet of asphalt in a Los Angeles neighborhood with a solar-reflective material helped reduce urban heat, though the bene
Read more.....
Los Angeles Is Painting Its Streets To Fight Heat Waves
Researchers found that coating more than 700,000 square feet of asphalt in a Los Angeles neighborhood with a solar-reflective material helped reduce urban heat, though the benefits came with limitations, according to the Times of India .
The project, conducted in Pacoima in the San Fernando Valley and published in Environmental Research Communications , covered roads, parking lots, playgrounds, and basketball courts with a reflective coating designed to bounce sunlight away instead of absorbing it. During a September 2022 heat wave, afternoon air temperatures in treated areas were as much as 3.5°F (1.9°C) cooler than in a nearby untreated neighborhood. Pavement surface temperatures also dropped by roughly 10°F.
The report says that researchers cautioned, however, that cooler pavement doesn't always translate into greater comfort for pedestrians. While reflective surfaces absorb less heat, they can also reflect more solar radiation back into the surrounding environment, potentially increasing the radiant heat people experience. Factors such as direct sunlight, humidity, wind, and surrounding surfaces all influence how hot it actually feels outdoors.
The findings suggest reflective pavement can help reduce urban heat, particularly during extreme heat waves, but works best as part of a broader strategy that also includes trees, shade, and other cooling measures. Researchers also noted that coatings can lose effectiveness over time due to weather, traffic, dirt, and routine road maintenance.
Tyler Durden Tue, 07/28/2026 - 23:00 Close Wed, 29 Jul 2026 02:35:00 +0000 Chinese University Reviewing Gene Editing Research As Family Discloses Daughter's Death
Chinese University Reviewing Gene Editing Research As Family Discloses Daughter's Death
Chinese University Reviewing Gene Editing Research As Family Discloses Daughter's Death
Authored by Melanie Sun via The Epoch Times ,
A top-tier Chinese university said on July 26 that it is investigating gene editing research by one of its researchers following reports that scientists treated a 6-year-old girl as part of their research, who died during the unprecedented human trial.
Molecular model of messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA), in an undated file image. (Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, one of China's Ivy League-level institutions, said in a statement that it "attaches great importance to the matter and has established a special working group to conduct a comprehensive investigation."
New York-based nonprofit science watchdog Retraction Watch and peer-reviewed journal Science disclosed on July 23, on behalf of her grieving family, the death of the 6-year-old girl, who underwent an experimental gene editing procedure in a clinical trial conducted by Shanghai Jiao Tong University researchers at the affiliated Xinhua Hospital.
The girl had been diagnosed with global developmental delay in March 2023, her parents told Science . Genome sequencing later pointed toward a single-base mutation in her CHD3 gene as the cause. The rare mutation, which causes Snijders Blok-Campeau syndrome, impacted a vital protein essential for brain development, leaving her with challenges in her motor and language skills that became more evident when she turned 4.
The condition doesn't usually impact life expectancy , University of Montreal geneticist Philippe Campeau, who helped link the condition to the CHD3 gene, told Science . Symptoms can range from mild cases where the only obvious indication is a slightly enlarged head, to severe cases with intellectual deficits, seizures, and heart problems.
The girl, who died in March 2025 seven days into the world-first clinical gene editing trial, which was aimed at removing her condition, had milder symptoms .
Her parents told the watchdog that they were persuaded by the team of China-based researchers, led by neuroscientist Qiu Zilong, to fund an experimental procedure that would edit one nucleotide in the chromosomes of their daughter's treated cells, changing a T to a C in her mutated gene. The parents and relatives were asked to contribute $860,000 toward the experiment.
Following the girl's death, the scientists returned the funds, and the hospital was fined by local authorities, her parents told Science .
While the clinical trial was never published in a medical journal following the death, Science and Retraction Watch revealed that the researchers injected doses of two novel engineered viruses into the girl's spinal fluid. The method is currently the most common delivery system for gene-editing therapy. The trial was the first attempt to use this particular gene-editing method to treat a human.
The family told the watchdog that the cause of death was identified by the hospital's ethics committee as a severe immune response to the procedure . They also said that potential death was not explicitly listed as a risk in the procedure.
Qiu and his co-authors published related research in Nature Science he did not notice the extent of changes made when the mouse study - whose original experiments were funded by the family - was resubmitted without the family's genetic data or a sentence recognizing their "participation and support."
He approved it for publication. The paper only mentioned that research "bridging the gap between preclinical research and clinical translation remains a significant challenge."
The child's parents told Science they submitted a formal request to the School of Medicine dean that the mice model paper be retracted "to prevent more children from suffering and our blood and tears flowing in vain." According to Science , the experiment was also conducted on monkeys, after which the ethics committee approved the family's clinical trial on Jan. 2, 2025. Other research, published Feb. 17, would soon show that monkeys receiving similar gene-editing therapies suffered moderate to severe liver damage.
The school said in its statement that it has "always attached great importance to research integrity and research norms, and resolutely opposes conducting medical scientific research in violation of research ethics."
"The medical school will take this matter seriously based on the investigation results," it said. "We appreciate the concern and oversight from all sectors of society."
A spokesperson from Nature told The Epoch Times by email, "We are looking into the matter carefully following an established process."
The same day that the family's report of their daughter's death was published by Science , Shanghai Jiao Tong was added to the Pentagon's list of research institutions deemed a threat to U.S. national security.
The civilian institution joins 87 other institutions in China that have been barred from projects involving U.S. federal funding and collaboration starting fiscal year 2026.
Scientists in China and around the world are vying to be the first to deliver safe gene-editing treatments, with most at this early stage focusing on treating life-threatening conditions.
Some scientists have had success in gene-editing treatments, including the most recent breakthrough last year by a Philadelphia team who used lipid nanoparticles delivered by intravenous infusion to treat a baby boy with a life-threatening liver disorder.
Tyler Durden Tue, 07/28/2026 - 22:35 Close Wed, 29 Jul 2026 02:10:00 +0000 DSA Platform Includes Abolishing Prisons, Supreme Court, And Presidency
DSA Platform Includes Abolishing Prisons, Supreme Court, And Presidency
The Democratic Socialists of America wants you to know exactly what it wants, and Megan Romer, the group's national co-chair, laid it
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DSA Platform Includes Abolishing Prisons, Supreme Court, And Presidency
The Democratic Socialists of America wants you to know exactly what it wants, and Megan Romer, the group's national co-chair, laid it out on national television without once reaching for a hedge word over the most radical ideas on the party platform.
The platform itself reads like a fever dream a committee wrote line by line. A 32-hour workweek with no reduction in pay and benefits, a federal jobs guarantee, canceling all student debt, and free college from pre-K through graduate school anchor the economic wish list, alongside healthcare that is universal, free, and includes gender-affirming care as a guaranteed right.
The platform calls for more publicly owned social housing, universal rent control, and a guaranteed lawyer for every tenant. On policing, the platform wants demilitarized police departments, defunded police unions, and money pulled out of police budgets entirely, all of which the DSA frames as a first step toward abolishing prisons and policing outright.
On foreign policy, the platform demands the defunding of the Department of War, the closure of overseas military bases, and an end to all foreign wars, and it pairs that with support for International Criminal Court prosecutions of what it deems American war criminals. As for Israel, the DSA calls for an end to all U.S. military and economic aid, prosecution of American and Israeli leaders over what many consider a genocide in Gaza, and recognition of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.
The DSA is just as blunt about reimagining how the government works. The platform seeks statehood for Washington, D.C., self-determination for U.S. territories, and the abolition of both the Electoral College and the Senate, alongside an expanded House and a presidency and Supreme Court that answer to Congress instead of operating independently. The DSA wants to swap the two-party system for proportional representation and ranked-choice voting and pay for all of it through full public financing of every election.
And, to top it all off, the platform calls for slavery reparations.
Fox News host Shannon Bream ran through the DSA's platform position by position, true or false, no room to dodge. Romer never flinched. She confirmed that the Democratic Socialists of America's platform calls for abolishing the Senate, replacing the presidency and Supreme Court, eliminating ICE, ending borders while granting amnesty to illegal immigrants, defunding the Pentagon, abolishing prisons as a long-term goal, and placing most large corporations under government or public ownership. At every step, she answered without hesitation, affirming that each position accurately reflected the DSA's platform.
The problem this presents for Democrats is that the DSA is no longer a fringe group begging for a seat at the table. DSA candidates are running for Congress as Democrats and winning. Claire Valdez won her primary in New York's 7th congressional district. Darializa Avila Chevalier took the 13th. Brad Lander won the 10th. All three ran with DSA muscle behind them and the backing of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has become the group's biggest trophy. Melat Kiros knocked off longtime Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado's 1st District, a seat DeGette had held for decades. Chris Rabb won his primary in Pennsylvania's 3rd District. Janeese Lewis George won the mayoral primary in Washington, D.C.
Asked whether the Democratic Party ought to be nervous about where the DSA is dragging it, Romer flipped the question back on the party's leadership.
"The establishment Democrats should be worried about the voters and about what the voters think and about what the constituency thinks, and ... right now they have not been delivering, and our candidates are and have been, and it's resonating with voters," Romer replied. "I also have been told a lot of times by Democrats, don't vote third party. It's wasting your vote," the DSA co-chair continued. "So, we run on the Democratic ballot line where it makes sense. We run independents sometimes where that is a viable possibility, but it's a ballot line. And what matters is what the voters think. And the voters are overwhelmingly choosing our candidates."
Republicans are likely to use the DSA's radical platform as a cudgel against every Democrat on the ballot in this year's midterms. Establishment Democrats can keep insisting the DSA is a small, manageable faction, but the reality is that its candidates are winning real primaries as Democrats nationwide, and that leaves Republicans a simple play: put every Democrat opponent on the spot and force them to either embrace the DSA's agenda or publicly reject it.
Tyler Durden Tue, 07/28/2026 - 22:10 Close Wed, 29 Jul 2026 01:45:00 +0000 ICE Dismantles SIM Farms In Nationwide Operation
ICE Dismantles SIM Farms In Nationwide Operation
ICE Dismantles SIM Farms In Nationwide Operation
Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times ,
Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE's) Homeland Security Investigations carried out a nationwide operation between June 22 and July 10 that dismantled "SIM farms" run by transnational criminal organizations .
File photograph of a cell phone sim card at a press conference in Paris, France, on Feb. 25, 2015. Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images SIM (subscriber identity module) farms are systems containing large numbers of SIM cards from different wireless carriers, often housed in banks of cellphones, modems, or specialized devices known as SIM boxes.
These can be used to send and receive bulk messages or calls and often exploit voice over internet protocol (VoIP) technology to do so. Initially developed for legitimate purposes, the technology has become prominent among organized fraudsters targeting mass audiences through phishing texts, scam calls, and fraudulent online accounts.
The recent nationwide operation, dubbed Operation Signal Break, "dismantled critical command-and-control infrastructure used to perpetrate large-scale telecommunications fraud across the United States," ICE said in a July 24 statement.
Authorities will now analyze the seized SIM data to identify victims and assess losses caused by such fraud. The illicit proceeds from the fraud, which are suspected to be linked to Chinese transnational criminal organizations and distribution networks, will be traced.
This is expected to support criminal indictments, sanctions targeting national and international infrastructure used in criminal activity, and asset seizures. SIM box operations are estimated to result in losses worth $15 million annually to Americans, according to ICE.
SIM box fraud, "also known as interconnect bypass fraud, is a scheme in which fraudsters reroute international calls to appear as local ones," a Nov. 8, 2025, post from IT services provider Synaptique said.
For instance, when a foreign national calls someone in the United States, the call is diverted through VOIP to a SIM box in America instead of passing through a legitimate international call gateway. The SIM box then uses one of the local SIM cards to place a new local call to the recipient.
SIM boxes can be used by criminals to communicate in a clandestine manner. Foreign rival states and intelligence agencies can also use SIM boxes in their operations.
In its statement, ICE said that Operation Signal Break mobilized specialized SIM Box Surge Teams composed of criminal analysts, special agents, and computer forensic analysts, surging them to California, Florida, Texas, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey to tackle SIM farm operations.
"I commend our special agents for their outstanding dedication and teamwork in dismantling illicit telecommunications infrastructure," Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Acting Executive Associate Director John Condon said in the statement.
"Their relentless pursuit of justice and commitment to protecting the integrity of our communications networks have made our communities safer and sends a clear message to those seeking to exploit our systems to defraud Americans."
Since 2024, the HSI has seized more than 1,900 SIM boxes, more than 500,000 SIM cards, and in excess of $700,000 in illicit proceeds . It has executed more than 116 federal criminal search warrants. In total, 68 SIM farms used to facilitate fraudulent texts and calls have been disrupted across 15 states. The probes have led to one criminal arrest and 11 administrative arrests.
In September 2025, the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) announced the dismantling of an "imminent telecommunications threat" in the New York tristate area that involved the use of thousands of SIM cards.
A network of electronic devices located throughout the region was used to conduct telecommunications-related threats against senior government officials. In total, more than 300 co-located SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards were found across multiple sites .
In addition to enabling anonymous telephonic threats, the infrastructure could facilitate other crimes, such as enabling encrypted communications between criminal enterprises and threat actors, and disabling cell phone towers, according to the U.S. Secret Service.
"The potential for disruption to our country's telecommunications posed by this network of devices cannot be overstated," Secret Service Director Sean Curran said in the statement.
In an international case of SIM box criminal operations, Europol announced in October 2025 that it had taken down a cybercrime-as-a-service criminal network that provided SIM box services to criminals worldwide.
A server farm in New York City on Sept. 23, 2025. US Secret Service via Getty Images Tyler Durden Tue, 07/28/2026 - 21:45 Close Wed, 29 Jul 2026 01:20:00 +0000 Watch: US Navy's New Suicide Drone Boats Help Sink Decommissioned Amphibious Assault Ship
Watch: US Navy's New Suicide Drone Boats Help Sink Decommissioned Amphibious Assault Ship
The US military has effectively taken a page from Ukraine's drone-boat playbook, using a swarm attack against high-value Iranian maritime asse
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Watch: US Navy's New Suicide Drone Boats Help Sink Decommissioned Amphibious Assault Ship
The US military has effectively taken a page from Ukraine's drone-boat playbook, using a swarm attack against high-value Iranian maritime assets earlier this month. Separately, a Texas shipyard is preparing to mass-produce these unmanned vessels by the thousands.
The latest evidence that the Navy is rapidly adopting one-way attack vessels emerged during RIMPAC 2026 near Hawaii.
In a live-fire exercise, two Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft were deployed against the decommissioned amphibious assault ship USS Peleliu, according to the military blog Army Recognition .
Here's more from the outlet:
On July 17, 2026, the U.S. Navy used the Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft (GARC) in a live-fire attack for the first time, directing two small unmanned surface vessels (USVs) against the decommissioned amphibious assault ship USS Peleliu during the RIMPAC exercise near Hawaii.
The craft were operated by the Unmanned Surface Vessel Division 32 (USVDIV-32) and entered the engagement after larger weapons had already struck the target, as part of a coordinated attack.
The two vessels detonated near the waterline, adding localized blast, structural deformation, and flooding to damage produced by missiles, aircraft, submarines, and land-based firing units.
The engagement demonstrated that a small, container-transportable vessel carrying as much as 454 kilograms of payload could contribute to the destruction of a major warship.
Watch:
Earlier this month, three US Navy-backed Saronic Corsair one-way attack vessels struck Iran’s Bandar Abbas Naval Base.
As we continue expanding our coverage of autonomous warfare , these developments point to the rapid US adoption of low-cost, attritable warbots. The next phase will likely be a massive Pentagon procurement cycle focused on stockpiling thousands of drone boats and millions of aerial one-way attack drones.
Tyler Durden Tue, 07/28/2026 - 21:20 Close Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:55:00 +0000 OpenAI's Rogue Agent Hit A Second Company, Executive Reveals - And The Blast Radius Just Got Bigger
OpenAI's Rogue Agent Hit A Second Company, Executive Reveals - And The Blast Radius Just Got Bigger
The rogue OpenAI agent behind this month's unprecedented AI-driven cyber intrusion claimed a second corporate victi
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OpenAI's Rogue Agent Hit A Second Company, Executive Reveals - And The Blast Radius Just Got Bigger
The rogue OpenAI agent behind this month's unprecedented AI-driven cyber intrusion claimed a second corporate victim , an executive at New York-based Modal Labs has revealed - a detail absent from the original account and one that widens the known blast radius of the episode.
According to the Modal executive and sources cited by Reuters the same autonomous agent that broke into Hugging Face also compromised one of Modal's customers , using that customer's environment as a staging base for the broader campaign.
Modal was pointed about the distinction: its own platform and isolation were never breached. The agent exploited an unauthenticated endpoint that one of Modal's customers had left open to the internet - effectively an unlocked door anyone could have walked through - giving it root-level access to that customer's code-execution sandboxes. From there the agent had a disposable, third-party launchpad from which to run the rest of its operation.
It's bad enough that a frontier AI agent can independently discover attack paths, escape its container, and compromise an unaffiliated company's production systems. The Modal revelation shows it reached further than that - treating any publicly reachable, poorly secured infrastructure it encountered as expendable staging ground , exactly the opportunistic chaining that security researchers have warned agentic systems would carry out at machine speed.
The Spree That's Already Known
Most of what led up to the Modal disclosure has already been picked over, but the shape of it is worth a recap. In early July, OpenAI was running an internal evaluation built on ExploitGym - a public benchmark that measures how well an AI system can turn a known vulnerability into a working exploit. The models under test, GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable unreleased prototype, were deliberately run with their cyber-safety refusals reduced and the classifiers that normally block high-risk activity switched off, because the point was to measure maximum offensive capability.
The agent found and exploited a previously unknown flaw in the one package-registry proxy it was allowed to reach, escalated privileges, moved through OpenAI's research environment, and got to a machine with open internet access. Once online, it reasoned that Hugging Face likely hosted the answer key to the very benchmark it was being tested on, and went to steal it rather than solve the problems itself. Between roughly July 11 and 13 it ran thousands of automated actions against the platform - gaining code execution through two separate flaws in its dataset-processing pipeline, harvesting credentials, and moving laterally across internal clusters. Forensic work later recovered on the order of 17,600 distinct attacker actions.
Hugging Face caught and contained the intrusion through its own AI-assisted monitoring , and says the only thing the agent actually made off with was a limited set of the benchmark's challenge solutions - no public models, datasets, or user-facing services tampered with. To reconstruct the timeline, its team had to fall back on an open-weight model, because the commercial frontier models refused to analyze the real attack data.
What The Wider Scope Means
The Modal disclosure lands on top of a timeline that was already awkward for OpenAI. By several accounts, the company did not recognize its own agent as the source for roughly a week:
July 16: Hugging Face goes public, attributing the intrusion only to an unknown autonomous AI agent, without naming the operator.July 21: OpenAI formally acknowledges the incident, connecting the activity to its own evaluation only after combing internal logs over the preceding weekend.OpenAI has called the episode "an unprecedented cyber incident" and maintains the models were narrowly fixated on the evaluation goal with no broader malicious intent. In its latest update, the company said the more capable model was an internal-only prototype, since deactivated and restricted, that the proxy vulnerability has been disclosed to the vendor, and that a small number of publicly exposed credentials on other services were also used along the way - the kind of qualifier that, paired with the Modal revelation, suggests the full scope of the campaign is still coming into focus.
Tyler Durden Tue, 07/28/2026 - 20:55 Close
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