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Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó has condemned remarks by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Budapest says amounted to a threat against Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Responding to comments made during a press briefing in Kyiv on Thursday, Szijjártó said the statement was “beyond every limit” and reflected what he described as “the kind of ‘culture’ coming from Kyiv.”

“This is the man Brussels admires and the country they want to fast-track into the European Union,” Szijjártó said.

“No one can threaten Hungary or its prime minister. No one can blackmail us just because we refuse to pay the price of Ukraine’s war and refuse to accept higher energy prices because of Ukraine.”

Zelensky had been speaking to compatriots about the proposed €90 billion European funding package for Ukraine, and warned that a single EU leader should not block the measure, widely interpreted as meaning Viktor Orbán.

“We hope that in the European Union, one person will not block the 90 billion [euros]. Otherwise, we will give this person’s address to the armed forces, to our guys, let them call him and talk to him in their own language,” Zelensky said.

Zelensky issues dire threat to Hungarian PM Orbán if he continues to block €90 billion in loans to Ukraine.

"We hope this one person [Orban] in the EU will not block €90 billion aid. Otherwise, we will give this person's address to our armed forces."pic.twitter.com/ayoSJlDCEs

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) March 5, 2026

The Patriots for Europe group in the European Parliament also criticized the comments, saying that “statements suggesting intimidation or threats of violence are incompatible with democratic principles and with the spirit of mutual respect that should guide relations between partners.”

The group noted that EU member states have already provided approximately €200 billion in support to Ukraine and said such rhetoric was difficult to reconcile with Ukraine’s ambition to join the European Union.

Tensions escalated further after Orbán responded on social media, declaring that Hungary would restore energy flows through the Druzhba oil pipeline by force, if necessary.

“There will be no deals, no compromise. We will break the Ukrainian oil blockade by force. Hungary’s energy will soon flow again through the Friendship pipeline,” Orbán wrote.

“President Zelensky’s threats are not about me. He is threatening Hungary. Unfortunately for him, he cannot stop me from protecting Hungarian families,” he added.

Several Members of the European Parliament stood in support of Hungary following the remarks.

“Let me remind you that Hungary decided to take this step not out of some whim or bad mood, but in response to Ukraine halting the transit of oil to Hungary via the Druzhba pipeline,” noted Polish MEP Ewa Zajaczkowska-Hernik, affiliated with the right-wing Confederation. “Because of this, fuel prices in Hungary have risen, and Prime Minister Orbán is simply standing firm in defense of his citizens.”

“Not another euro for Zelensky and his corrupt gang! We stand with Hungary,” added Austrian Freedom Party MEP Harald Vilimsky.

REACTION OF THE PRIME MINISTER OF THE SLOVAK REPUBLIC, ROBERT FICO, TO THE BLACKMAILING BEHAVIOR OF UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT ZELENSKYY

I express full solidarity with the Prime Minister of Hungary, @PM_ViktorOrban. If the Ukrainian president continues like this, it may happen that… pic.twitter.com/NLKfyZPZ1j

— Robert Fico ???? (@RobertFicoSVK) March 5, 2026

“Zelensky has long been making a mistake by allowing himself to be used by the European Union to cooperate with Von der Leyen and the Brussels troop in the massive interference in the Hungarian election campaign,” added Spain’s Vox MEP Hermann Tertsch. “It’s very likely that their plan will backfire.”

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico also weighed in late on Thursday. In a video posted on social media, Fico expressed “full solidarity” with his Hungarian counterpart, and intimated that “if the Ukrainian president continues like this, it may be that other EU member states will also block the €90 billion loan.”

He further urged key members of the European Commission and European Parliament to “distance themselves” from what he called Zelensky’s “outrageous blackmailing statements.”

Read more here...

Authored by Daniel Lü via The Daily Sceptic,

Ofcom has confirmed it is referring 4chan to a final enforcement decision under the Online Safety Act. The target is a Delaware company that runs an entirely anonymous imageboard from the United States, with no offices, staff, servers or assets in Britain.

The demand: install age-verification systems and content filters so that British children cannot access the site or face daily fines levied from London on an American platform.

This case is not an outlier.

It is the clearest real-world demonstration of what the new generation of “online safety” laws requires: private companies must build automated filters that decide, in advance, which legal speech is too harmful for minors to see. The question the regulators never quite answer is simple: what exactly does the filter catch?

In the early 2020s, a political consensus formed on both sides of the Atlantic: social media is harming children and something must be done. The result in Washington was the Kids’ Online Safety Act (KOSA); in Westminster, the Online Safety Act (OSA), which received Royal Assent in October 2023 and began enforcement in 2025. The political appeal of both measures is genuine. Adolescent mental health deteriorated in the 2010s, parents are alarmed and platforms have appeared indifferent. But good intentions do not make good law, and the form these interventions took is constitutionally and morally indefensible. Both KOSA and the OSA rest on a duty-of-care model: platforms must take “reasonable measures” or implement “proportionate systems” to prevent minors from encountering content associated with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm and suicide. This is not a regulation of conduct. It is a mandate to suppress speech based on its topic and its predicted emotional effect on a reader: the very definition of content-based regulation.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) stated the constitutional problem plainly in its July 2023 letter opposing KOSA: the bill “is a content-based regulation of constitutionally protected speech” that “will silence important conversations, limit minors’ access to potentially vital resources and violate the First Amendment”.  Under Reed v. Town of Gilbert, a law is content-based if it “applies to particular speech because of the topic discussed or the idea or message expressed”. Content-based regulations are “presumptively unconstitutional”.

The ACLU identified three specific constitutional failures.

First, the speech targeted is protected. The Supreme Court has never permitted government to suppress legal speech simply because a legislature finds it unsuitable for children. In Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, the Court was unambiguous: “Speech that is neither obscene as to youths nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them.” Creating a “wholly new category of content-based regulation” permissible only for speech directed at children would be “unprecedented and mistaken”.

Second, these regimes fail strict scrutiny because they are not premised on demonstrated causation. As the ACLU wrote, KOSA “is not premised on a direct causal link, but instead is based on correlation, not evidence of causation”. This is a decisive legal and moral point. In Brown, the Court struck down California’s video game restriction on exactly the same grounds: the state had produced only correlative data. A law that restricts the speech of millions of people must show that the restriction will actually prevent the harm it identifies. Neither KOSA nor the OSA can clear that bar.

Third, these regimes are both under- and over-inclusive. They leave news media, books, music and magazines entirely unregulated while targeting social media platforms. And they will, inevitably, sweep up beneficial speech alongside harmful speech: 92% of parental control apps have been found to incorrectly block LGBTQ+ content and suicide-prevention resources alongside material that is genuinely harmful. Congress, the ACLU concluded, may not rely on unproven future technology to save the statute.

The empirical premise of both regimes is that social media causes mental illness in adolescents. This claim is contested by a substantial body of peer-reviewed research. In a widely noted book review in Nature, Candice L. Odgers, a psychologist specialising in adolescent mental health at UC Irvine, wrote that the graphs produced by Jonathan Haidt in his work The Anxious Generation, which align the rise in teen mental illness with smartphone adoption, “will be useful in teaching my students the fundamentals of causal inference, and how to avoid making up stories by simply looking at trend lines”. Hundreds of researchers, Odgers wrote, “have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative.” The direction of causality may run the other way: distressed and isolated adolescents gravitate toward online community; social media does not necessarily create the distress.

The practical implication is stark. Existing criminal law already covers the most serious harms comprehensively: child sexual abuse material (CSAM), terrorist content, incitement to violence and harassment are all criminal in both jurisdictions and all designated “priority illegal content” under the OSA’s Schedules 5-7. The genuinely novel element of both regimes is the duty to suppress legal speech about mental health, gender identity and emotional distress. That element is what fails both the First Amendment and basic proportionality analysis.

The most immediate and documented casualty of the OSA’s implementation has been LGBTQ+ communities. This is not an implementation error. It is structural: the content filters platforms deploy to comply with age-assurance obligations cannot distinguish between content that causes harm to LGBTQ+ youth and content that protects them. Following the July 2025 enforcement rollout, Reddit moved significant LGBTQ+ community content behind age-verification barriers on the logic that queer content is “adult content” and therefore, under the Act, presumptively harmful to children. As OpenDemocracy documented, content creators who are “queer, trans or racialised”, or whose content focuses on these communities, have been “disproportionately targeted, with anything ‘queer’ indiscriminately labelled as ‘adult’”. For trans people, the harm is compounded by the identity documentation problem. Age verification requires users to produce government-issued identity matching their legal name and sex. In 2018, fewer than 5,000 trans people in the UK held a Gender Recognition Certificate, out of an estimated 200,000-500,000. For those without legal gender recognition, age verification is not a minor inconvenience, it forces them to out themselves to a commercial third party as a condition of internet access, creating a permanent record linking their legal identity to spaces they may be using precisely to explore their identity in safety. The moral stakes here are not abstract. For LGBTQ+ young people who cannot be open at home or school, online community is not a convenience but a lifeline. Stonewall has warned that anonymity-reduction measures create a “chilling effect” that puts LGBTQ+ people in genuine danger, particularly in the 12 countries where being LGBTQ+ carries the death penalty. As Stonewall’s Director of External Affairs wrote: “The UK’s Online Safety Bill could become the playbook for countries looking to use digital surveillance to identify and persecute their LGBTQ+ citizens.” The US State Department’s 2024 Human Rights Practices Report criticised the OSA for pressuring US social media platforms to “censor speech deemed misinformation or hate speech”.

The regulatory pressure on US platforms is not confined to Ofcom. On February 24th 2026, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK’s independent data protection regulator, issued Reddit, Inc. a £14.47 million fine for unlawfully processing children’s personal information: the largest penalty the ICO has ever imposed for breaches of children’s privacy. The ICO found that Reddit, despite prohibiting users under 13 by its terms of service, applied no robust age assurance mechanism from May 2018 until July 2025, and therefore had no lawful basis for processing the personal data of under-13s under the UK General Data Protection Regulation. Reddit’s omission to carry out a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) focused on the risks to children before January 2025 separately breached Articles 5, 6, 8 and 35 of the UK GDPR. Reddit has announced its intention to appeal, calling the ICO’s requirement to collect identity information from users “counterintuitive and at odds with our strong belief in our users’ online privacy and safety”. The ICO acted under its Age Appropriate Design Code (the ‘Children’s Code’) rather than the OSA, but the two regimes are coordinated: the ICO has openly admitted that it works in partnership with Ofcom, as the ICO stated in its December 2025 children’s privacy progress update, “to ensure efforts are coordinated”. The fine is legally distinct from OSA enforcement but functionally complementary to it: where Ofcom targets platforms’ content-governance duties, the ICO targets their data-governance failures, and the same underlying conduct of allowing age-unverified users to access content triggers liability under both regimes simultaneously. The ICO is now conducting a broader review of at least 17 platforms popular with children in the UK, including Discord, Pinterest and X. Reddit’s objection also surfaces another contradiction the ICO has not resolved: the age verification it effectively mandates creates a permanent record linking users’ legal identities to their platform activity, held by third-party age verification processors entirely outside the platforms’ own systems, and the data practices of those processors are, as the ICO’s own enforcement demonstrates, largely beyond the regulator’s concern.

The contrast between the ICO’s vigour against American social media platforms and its passivity toward British police forces is, on its face, a study in selective enforcement.

The same week that John Edwards announced the £14.47 million Reddit fine and spoke at the IAPP UK Intensive, the story of Alvi Choudhury was making national television. Choudhury, a 26 year-old British Bangladeshi software engineer, had been arrested at his home in Southampton in January 2026 by Thames Valley Police, who suspected him of committing a £3,000 burglary in Milton Keynes: a city he has never visited, 100 miles away. The arrest was triggered by a retrospective facial recognition match against Cognitec software that runs 25,000 searches per month against approximately 19 million custody photographs held on the Police National Database. Choudhury was held in custody for nearly 10 hours before officers examined the alibi evidence he had been offering since his arrest. When he eventually saw the CCTV footage that had identified him, he told the Guardian the suspect looked approximately 10 years younger, with lighter skin, a bigger nose, no facial hair and different eyes and lips. His own mugshot had been on the police system in the first place only because he was wrongly arrested in 2021 after being the victim of an assault; his DNA was subsequently deleted, but his custody photograph was not. Thames Valley Police’s response was, on its own account, revealing. The force acknowledged the arrest “may have been the result of bias within facial recognition technology”, but an officer told Choudhury that “as the use of facial recognition is already subject to review at a strategic level”, he did not feel the need to raise the matter for wider organisational learning. The force’s public statement went further, reframing the failure entirely: the arrest, it said, was based on the investigating officer’s own visual assessment after the algorithmic match, and therefore “was not influenced by racial profiling”. The position that a human officer confirming a racially biased algorithmic result absolves the institution of responsibility for racial bias merits no extended comment. This is not an isolated incident. In January 2026, another force paid damages to a black man wrongly arrested using the same technology. Home Office research, suppressed until December 2025 when it was published deep within a consultation document by Liberty Investigates, found that the algorithm generates false positive matches at a rate of 5.5% for Black faces and 4.0% for Asian faces, compared with 0.04% for white faces: a disparity of more than 100 to one.

When Edwards took the stage, he explained the ICO’s enforcement philosophy: the regulator must “very deliberately choose our focus”, concentrating on “AI and biometrics, children’s privacy and online tracking”. Police facial recognition involves all three. But the ICO has conducted audits, expressed concern through its Deputy Commissioner, and asked the Home Office for “urgent clarity” and stopped there. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has been more forthright: it was granted permission in August 2025 to intervene in a judicial review of the Metropolitan Police’s live facial recognition programme, arguing the deployments are unlawful for want of a clear legal basis. A comment made at the time about the ICO’s posture proved apt: the regulator had “stressed the need for FRT deployment with appropriate safeguards” while sitting “on the fence” as others sought judicial determination of whether current use is “strictly necessary”. The juxtaposition is instructive. The regulator charged with protecting personal data finds £14 million worth of urgency in Reddit’s failure to age-verify its users, and no comparable urgency in a biometric surveillance system that its own deputy has called “disappointing”, that the government’s own research shows discriminates against minorities by a factor exceeding 100, and that has produced wrongful arrests of racial minorities on the basis of a technology the operating force itself concedes may be racially biased. The filter, as always, catches what the filter is not intentionally designed to catch.

All of this would be a domestic British problem if the OSA’s reach were confined to British soil. It is not. Section 3 of the OSA applies to any service with “links with the United Kingdom”, which Ofcom has interpreted to include any platform with a significant UK user base regardless of where it is domiciled, incorporated or operated. In March 2025, Ofcom wrote to 4chan Community Support LLC, a Delaware LLC with no offices, staff or assets outside the United States, to inform it that it was a regulated service because approximately 7% of its traffic came from UK IP addresses and must therefore provide information regarding its illegal content risk assessment and its qualifying worldwide revenue. 4chan refused to respond to either request. In October, Ofcom issued escalating demands, investigations and a £20,000 fine plus a penalty of £100 per day for up to 60 days for non-compliance with information requests, all served by email to US addresses. 4chan again refused to pay. In August 2025, 4chan and Kiwi Farms (Lolcow LLC) filed a federal lawsuit against Ofcom in the District of Columbia, alleging violations of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments, pre-emption by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and conflict with the SPEECH Act. Ofcom responded by asserting sovereign immunity under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, claiming both the right to issue binding censorship orders to Americans on American soil and immunity from any American legal response.

Ofcom’s enforcement action against 4chan did not end with the October 2025 information-gathering fine. On February 12th 2026, Ofcom issued a second Provisional Decision against 4chan, proposing both a single penalty and a daily rate penalty for contraventions of sections 9, 10, and 12 of the OSA: its substantive duties to conduct a suitable illegal content risk assessment, to set out adequate user protections in its terms of service, and to implement age verification to prevent children from encountering explicit content. Counsel for 4chan, Preston Byrne, replied the same day: “Increasing the size of a censorship fine does not cure its legal invalidity in the United States.” The deadline for representations having passed without compliance, Ofcom confirmed on February 27th that it was referring the matter to a final decision maker under its Online Safety Enforcement Guidelines. The progression is systematic: from information requests under section 100, to a confirmation decision imposing penalties, to a second provisional decision targeting the Act’s substantive content-safety and age-verification duties. Each escalatory step expands the scope of demanded compliance and raises the potential penalty exposure. For an anonymous platform operating exclusively in the United States, age verification for an anonymous imageboard is not a technical requirement: it is an existential one.

The domestic British appeals framework for these decisions is itself still being constructed. On February 26th 2026, the Tribunal Procedure Committee (TPC) opened a consultation on amending the Upper Tribunal Procedure Rules to accommodate the new rights of appeal created by the OSA. Under section 168 of the Act, any person with a sufficient interest may challenge Ofcom’s confirmation decisions, penalty notices and technology notices before the Upper Tribunal. The TPC provisionally proposes a three-month window for permission-to-appeal applications by interested persons who are not the direct recipients of an Ofcom notice, departing from Ofcom’s own preference for one month. On costs, the TPC agrees with Ofcom’s proposal to displace the usual no-costs rule, recognising that the tribunal should have broader discretion to award costs in OSA cases given the likely complexity and evidence-heavy nature of such appeals, and that the existing rule would leave Ofcom unable to recover costs even where it successfully defends a decision. Ofcom is a regulator with the power to fine companies hundreds of millions of pounds, funded by fees levied on the very industry it regulates, and it is now asking for the right to make anyone who challenges it in court pay Ofcom’s legal bills if they lose. The consultation closes May 21st 2026.

This structural asymmetry is what the GRANITE Act directly addresses. Conceptualised by Byrne and introduced in the Wyoming Legislature as HB 70, the ‘Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny and Extortion Act’ passed the Wyoming House of Representatives 46-12 on February 23rd 2026. It strips foreign sovereigns of immunity in US state courts when they attempt to enforce censorship orders against US persons and creates a private right of action with minimum statutory damages of $1 million per violation, or 10% of the defendant’s annual US-related revenue, whichever is greater. It also prevents Wyoming courts from recognising any foreign judgment that infringes constitutionally protected speech, extending the model of the SPEECH Act (28 U.S.C. §§ 4101-4105) from defamation to the full range of First Amendment-protected expression. If censoring an American exposes a foreign regulator to a sufficiently significant civil judgment, the cost-benefit calculation changes dramatically.

A separate American legal theory operates through the Sherman Act and does not depend on overcoming FSIA immunity at all. Ofcom’s sovereign immunity defence may insulate the regulator itself from direct suit, but it extends no protection to the private actors who shaped the OSA’s regulatory design. The OSA imposes identical nominal obligations on all regulated services, but its fixed compliance costs fall proportionally far harder on smaller platforms than on large incumbents with existing legal, technical and compliance teams that can simply be redirected to satisfy new requirements: a pattern antitrust economists describe as raising rivals’ costs. For example, where well-resourced incumbents privately coordinated with regulators to embed compliance standards they could more easily satisfy than their rivals, the resulting framework may reflect competitive preferences rather than independent regulatory judgement. Under Continental Ore Co. v. Union Carbide & Carbon Corp., routing an anticompetitive scheme through a foreign governmental apparatus does not immunise the private actors who designed it. The Noerr-Pennington doctrine, which ordinarily protects petitioning activity, rests on First Amendment foundations that protect the right to petition American government; the stronger legal argument is that it does not extend to petitioning of foreign regulators. Where the factual record supports coordination beyond ordinary advocacy, Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act remain available tools even where the regulatory mechanism is British.

If you care about children’s mental health and safety online, there are three new bills in Congress that are worth knowing about: the SAFE Act, the ECCHO Act and the Stop Sextortion Act (collectively known as the James T. Woods Act). Together they address real, documented harm in ways that KOSA and the UK’s Online Safety Act, simply do not.

The package addresses three documented gaps in federal law.

• The SAFE Act repeals outdated CSAM sentencing provisions and directs the US Sentencing Commission to develop updated guidelines reflecting modern patterns of dangerous conduct. Right now, federal sentencing rules are outdated and largely ignored: fewer than one in three cases are sentenced within the existing guidelines. This bill would clear the way for the US Sentencing Commission to write new, updated rules that reflect how online abuse works today.

• The ECCHO Act creates a new federal crime targeting networks, most notoriously Network 764, that use online group chats to coerce emotionally vulnerable children into self-harm, suicide and violence, with penalties up to life imprisonment where a victim dies or attempts suicide.

• The Stop Sextortion Act explicitly criminalises sextortion for the first time under federal law, responding to a 33% rise in financially motivated cases in 2024 and more than 40 child deaths linked to these schemes. Unlike KOSA or OSA, the James T. Woods Act does not try to police what people say online. They target what predators do: coercion, blackmail and the deliberate manipulation of children into harm. That is a meaningful distinction, and it is why this package has earned support from more than two dozen organizations across the political spectrum, including the FBI Agents Association, RAINN, the National District Attorneys Association, the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children and Thorn.

The moral case against both the OSA and KOSA is not that children’s wellbeing is unimportant. It is that suppressing protected speech is both the wrong instrument and a dangerous one. The wrong instrument because the science does not establish that social media causes the harms these laws address, and because the content filters that implement these regimes cannot distinguish beneficial from harmful speech. A dangerous one because the same mechanism that blocks, for example, pro-anorexia posts will also block access to eating disorder recovery communities; the same filter that catches self-harm instructions will catch trans youth support forums; and the same regulator empowered to define ‘harmful’ content today may be led by someone with very different ideas about what speech is harmful tomorrow. Above all, it is dangerous because the machinery of protection, once built, does not confine itself to its original target: Japanese Americans were interned after Pearl Harbour; Muslims were surveilled, infiltrated and placed on no-fly lists after September 11th, some rendered to CIA black sites abroad and others tortured at Guantanamo Bay without charge or trial; McCarthyite loyalty boards destroyed careers on the basis that association predicted subversion; and the FBI’s COINTELPRO program turned the apparatus of domestic security against the civil rights movement, monitoring Martin Luther King Jr. as a threat to national security on the pretext of alleged communist infiltration. In each case, the instrument was constructed in good faith to address a genuine fear; in each case the stated rationale was correlation dressed as causation; and in each case the same institutional machinery, once normalised, was available for use against the next group a future administration found threatening.

Ofcom’s attempt to extend this regime to American soil raises the stakes further. It asserts, in effect, that British regulators may determine what Americans are permitted to say on the American internet and that American law has no recourse. That is not a tenable position under the First Amendment, under any established principles of international jurisdiction or under any defensible conception of democratic self-governance. The GRANITE Act is the beginning of the American legal system’s answer.

A brief postscript. I recently sent a prior version of this article to a member of the House of Lords who had asked to read it. Parliament’s email filter blocked it. Repeatedly. The peer could not open the attachment because the system flagged it as suspicious. The article, with working title ‘What the Filter Catches’, was itself caught by a filter. I could not have asked for a better illustration of the argument. Sometimes the world just does the work for you.

Note: The author has submitted Freedom of Information requests to the US Department of State, the Department of Justice, the National Security Council, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Trade Commission, the UK ICO as well as Ofcom itself seeking documents relating to Ofcom’s extraterritorial enforcement strategy. Those requests remain pending.

Authored by Andrew Moran via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The conflict in Iran could have consequences for international trade that extend beyond oil and gas.

It has been less than a week since the start of the U.S.–Israeli operations in Iran, and oil tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz—a key global chokepoint for energy shipments—has come to a screeching halt. Approximately 200 oil tankers have been stranded in the Gulf, according to data from Lloyd’s List Intelligence.

The strait handles an estimated 20 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum products per day, with a majority being directed to Asia.

While Tehran has not officially shuttered the narrow waterway, it has been effectively closed by Western insurers, which have canceled coverage or raised risk premiums.

It is not only maritime commerce and energy that are being adversely affected by the conflict.

Planes carrying air cargo out of the Middle East have been grounded. Other vessels have started detouring around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, a move that adds days and raises fuel costs to a trip.

The longer the war drags on, the greater the odds that it could bleed into the broader global supply chain, whether for consumer goods or construction equipment.

Key construction and manufacturing materials such as cement, concrete, and sand are produced across the Middle East. Seven percent of the global aluminum supply flows through the strait. Pharmaceuticals manufactured in India or natural-gas-based products produced in Saudi Arabia traverse the region.

A prolonged conflict in Iran would cause delays and potentially product shortages, leading to higher production and transportation costs.

The Containerized Freight Index has already climbed by more than 5 percent in the past month. In the liquefied natural gas market, shipping rates have increased by 650 percent to $300,000 per day, according to shipbroker Fearnleys.

These developments could revive broad-based price pressures at a time when aggregate inflation levels have been slowing despite the United States’ global tariffs.

The annual inflation rate in the United States is running at 2.4 percent.

Mitigating High Energy Prices

The administration has sought to thaw frozen trade and stabilize global energy markets by offering naval escorts and political risk insurance guarantees—coverage that protects companies against financial losses caused by conflict and hostile geopolitical environments.

It is a welcomed step, but industry players are still cautious, according to Stamatis Tsantanis, CEO and chairman of Seanergy Maritime.

“Shipowners and operators will need to see a clear, secure corridor established before confidence fully returns,” Tsantanis said in a note emailed to The Epoch Times.

“The priority for the industry is not just moving cargo, but protecting the lives of seafarers, the value of vessels, and avoiding what could become a major environmental disaster if a tanker were seriously hit in such a narrow and sensitive waterway.”

Uncertainty about the vital artery has contributed to this week’s spike in energy prices.

Crude oil prices are still surging, with a barrel of West Texas Intermediate approaching $80 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent, an international benchmark for oil prices, is inching closer to $85 per barrel.

Natural gas has edged up to about $3 per million British thermal units. Gasoline prices and heating oil futures have risen by 9 percent and 37 percent, respectively, over the past week.

Even with security guarantees or an end to the conflict, restoring trade flows would still take time.

“Shipping has always adapted to geopolitical tensions, but restoring normal flows through Hormuz will depend on credible security arrangements that give crews, owners, and insurers the confidence that transit through the strait is genuinely safe,” Tsantanis said.

‘Magnitude of the Drag’

For now, market watchers are mainly concerned about the effects of rising energy costs on near-term inflation and growth prospects—and the Federal Reserve’s policy strategies.

“A brief spike in oil prices would have little lasting effect on inflation. Energy prices would need to be sustained higher over weeks or months before we see it push CPI meaningfully higher,” David Rees, global head of economics at Schroders, said in a March 3 note.

“However, higher sustained energy inflation would squeeze real incomes, weigh on growth, and raise doubts about whether central banks, such as the U.S. Federal Reserve, can continue easing monetary policy.”

The rule of thumb is that every $10 jump in oil prices shaves off 0.1 percentage point from gross domestic product growth and increases inflation by 0.2 percentage points.

Additionally, rising oil prices tend to have a lag effect in the broader economy, according to Sarah Wolfe, a strategist at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. Consumption generally begins to slow two to three months after a price shock and remains tepid for five to six months.

“The magnitude of the drag depends on the duration and persistence of higher energy prices,” she said in a March 4 note.

The situation, meanwhile, could force the Federal Reserve and other central banks to reconsider easing efforts.

The Fed, facing an energy supply shock, is likely to keep interest rates on hold as officials assess the situation and watch the incoming data.

At a March 3 Bloomberg event, Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari said the conflict has ignited uncertainty surrounding the outlook for policy and the economy.

“The question I think that we are wrestling with, and markets are wrestling with, is, how long is this going to ?last? How bad is it going to get? Is it going to look more like Russia–Ukraine, or is it going to look more like Hamas attacking Israel, ?and that’s going to have effects on monetary policy,” Kashkari said.

These conflicts can make the inflationary trajectory harder to predict, he said.

Futures market data indicate that traders have started pushing out the first quarter-point rate cut of 2026 to September, even as Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s term expires in May and the president’s new pick takes over the job.

But the brief Iran–Israel war in June 2025 underscored how resilient the global economy has become to Middle East shocks. Oil spiked above $82 a barrel after the United States and Israel struck Iranian nuclear sites, but prices slid back below $70 within months. Growth and inflation in the United States and other major economies were hardly impacted.

Authored by Autumn Spredemann via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a critical threshold that online job seekers must cross, but the technology has presented a unique challenge.

As employers increasingly lean on AI systems to screen, schedule, and evaluate candidates, applicants must learn how to get past the algorithm before reaching human consideration.

More hiring and recruiting professionals are using applicant tracking systems, many of which involve generative AI, according to a report from the International Research Journal on Advanced Engineering Hub. At a glance, these systems help overwhelmed employers sort and prioritize resumes, schedule interviews, and more.

Last year, nearly 98 percent of Fortune 500 companies used some type of applicant tracking systems, according to a Jobscan analysis. Research from Select Software Reviews found that 70 percent of large companies are using an applicant tracking systems, as well as 20 percent of small- to mid-sized businesses.

This has given rise to fears that resumes are being filtered out without any human judgment. Critics have brushed aside these concerns as myth or a misunderstanding of how an applicant tracking systems works, according to findings from Enhancv.

However, an EDLIGO analysis of 1,000 resumes from qualified candidates across multiple industries showed 43 percent of applicants were rejected for reasons that had nothing to do with their skills. The independent study ran selected, verified resumes through the top three applicant tracking systems platforms: Workday, Taleo, and Greenhouse. The 43 percent rejection rate was due to “formatting, parsing, or arbitrary filter failures.”

People who work in hiring say job seekers’ fears of an applicant tracking systems rejecting their resume aren’t unfounded.

“This isn’t just a claim; it is the fundamental reality of modern hiring,” Gloria Espina, founder of Recruitment Gal, told The Epoch Times.

Espina said job hunting has become a type of “algorithmic audition” that was born out of necessity.

“The ‘easy apply’ button has effectively broken the top of the hiring funnel. It turned applying for a job into a mindless, low-friction swipe,” she said. “As a result, recruiters are flooded with thousands of applications that aren’t even remotely suitable, which completely buries the highly qualified candidates under a mountain of digital noise.”

Espina acknowledged that an applicant tracking system is an essential gatekeeper to manage applicant chaos, but it’s also a rigid one.

“Most legacy systems are painfully literal. They scan for keywords but completely fail to identify entities or context. An algorithm might check the box for the word ‘leadership,’ but it misses the contextual power of ‘scaled a remote team across three time zones during a merger,’” she said. “Context is where the actual value of a candidate lives, but our systems are still grading them on a basic vocabulary test.”

Digital Tripwire

The problem of software rejecting a job applicant without human consideration isn’t a new one.

A 2021 Harvard Business School study found that 88 percent of job candidates were rejected by an applicant tracking system because their resumes didn’t match the posted criteria closely enough. However, the study authors stated the same applicants were capable of performing the necessary tasks at a “high level” with proper training.

And therein lies the nuance. The sheer volume of job applicants for most posted openings has created the algorithmic audition.

“Many candidates likely don’t realize how many applications the average job posting receives. We often receive 300 [to] 500 applications within a week of posting a mid-level professional role, and using an ATS [applicant tracking system] helps us sort them by relevance and prioritize the queue,” Matt Erhard, managing partner at Summit Search Group, told The Epoch Times.

Erhard said the issue isn’t software. He said the real problem is that many resumes are “unclear, generic, or misaligned with the role,” which makes it challenging for a reviewer to identify candidates who are a good fit.

Alex Chepovoi, CEO of the job search platform Global Work AI, said the first thing to read your resume “is an algorithm.”

“Applicant tracking systems scan, filter, and reject resumes in seconds based on keywords, education, and experience specifics, and sometimes even demographic indicators,” Chepovoi told The Epoch Times.

He said to pass the “AI gate” and catch the attention of an employer, a savvy job hunter must first optimize their resume for skills.

“Make sure your experience section clearly reflects the keywords used in the job description. If the vacancy says ‘project management,’ don’t just say ‘led initiatives,’ say project management,” he said.

Another recommendation Chepovoi offered was minimizing personal data on the resume.

“Age, exact address, even gender indicators can unintentionally trigger filters. Focus on professional value.”

Gregg Podalsky, president of American Recruiting & Consulting Group, said candidates should focus on creating tailored resumes that match the job description.

“The real issue is alignment. If a resume does not clearly reflect the skills and requirements outlined in the job description, it may rank lower and never get serious consideration. That is not a flaw in the technology; it is a mismatch in presentation,” Podalsky told The Epoch Times.

He noted it’s critical to mirror the language of the job description where appropriate, clearly list measurable accomplishments, and make skills easy to identify.

“Avoid overly creative formats that [applicant tracking] systems cannot parse properly. Clarity, structure, and relevance matter more than design,” Podalsky said.

Getting past the initial AI gatekeeper and not ending up at the bottom of a list is a challenge that’s recognized across the board. In January, the job search engine Indeed published a list of best practices for “beating” an applicant tracking systems, which includes things like avoiding acronyms, adding a skills section, using relevant keywords, and submitting the correct file type.

In the EDLIGO study, 23 percent of resumes were rejected due to the inability to read the file, and another 12 percent were declined due to formatting issues.

The Details

Sleek, clever formatting can actually do more harm than good when it comes to getting your resume in front of an actual person.

“To survive the filter but stand out to the human on the other side, you must anchor those keywords to measurable outcomes,” Espina said.

“Eliminate the fluff, the generic soft skills, and the complex formatting. Nobody cares that you are a ‘highly motivated team player.’ Take out the objective statements, the heavy graphics, and the columns. Those break in the [applicant tracking system].”

Podalsky said, “In 2026, strong resumes will focus on impact. Quantifiable results, specific tools used, and clear examples of problem-solving stand out.”

He agreed job seekers should eliminate vague phrases like “team player” or “results-driven” and replace them with evidence.

“Authenticity, relevance, and measurable contribution will always outperform keyword stuffing or AI-polished fluff,” he said.

Erhard concurred, saying, “Hiring managers today want evidence of impact. Candidates should add quantified achievement, including the scope, metrics, and outcomes.”

As an example, Erhard said, “led a team of eight and reduced project delivery times by 20 percent,” was better than just listing responsibilities on a resume.

Read the rest here...

Authored by Debra Heine via American Greatness,

A Minnesota state employee who vandalized six Tesla vehicles last year, causing up to $21,000 in damage, received no jailtime and just a single-day suspension from his job, state records show.

Dylan Adams, an employee with the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS), was caught on Tesla security cameras keying the vehicles in March and early April 2025, amid a rash of anti-Tesla vandalism and firebomb attacks throughout the nation.

The anti-Tesla attacks coincided with nationwide “Tesla Takedown” demonstrations organized by ActBlue-funded groups to agitate against Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s role in the Trump administration as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

As the Fiscal Policy Analyst and Compliance Lead on DHS’s Program Integrity Team, Adams is reportedly responsible for preventing  waste, fraud and abuse in public benefit programs in a state that has recently seen an estimated $300 million in child nutrition funds and $9 billion in Medicaid funds lost to waste, fraud, and abuse.

According to a report on the Minnesota DHS investigation, Adams indicated that he was “concerned” about Musk making a “Nazi salute” during a 2024 campaign event, a malicious smear propagated by Democrats and their allies in the media.

He also admitted that he vandalized the Teslas “in hopes the owners would disassociate themselves from Elon Musk and Tesla.”

Adams told investigators he was “on a break” or “out sick” during the times he was out keying Tesla vehicles, however Adams’ state time card, obtained by Alpha News, shows he logged a full eight-hour workday during the time period he was committing some of the crimes.

Regardless, he was “punished” with just an unpaid, one-day suspension on Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026.

“You are reminded that you are expected to comply with all Enterprise and Agency policies and fulfill your responsibility of maintaining public trust; failure to do so could result in further disciplinary action up to and including termination of your employment,” a letter sent to Adams on Jan. 20 reads.

Adams was informed that he had the right to appeal the day off, but there is no indication that he objected to the minor slap on the wrist.

Minnesota House Republican Leader Harry Niska said:

“the message is clear: if you belong to a certain class of state employees, Gov. Walz and Minnesota Democrats will protect you.”

Soros-backed Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty (D.) announced last year that the vandal would not be charged with a crime and would instead opt for a “diversion program” for him.

“We offered diversion as we often do with property damage cases when the person has no record,” Moriarty’s spokesman said.

“Mr. Adams will have to complete the requirements of the program. He will also have to pay every penny in restitution to the victims. If he does not meet those requirements, we will proceed through the criminal legal system process.”

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara expressed frustration with the decision not to pursue felony charges, noting the significant damage and impact on multiple victims.

“The Minneapolis Police Department did its job. It identified and investigated a crime trend, identified, and arrested a suspect, and presented a case file to the Hennepin County Attorney Office for consideration of charges,” O’Hara said in a statement to media outlets last April.

“This case impacted at least six different victims and totaled over $20,000 in damages. Any frustration related to the charging decision of the Hennepin County Attorney should be directed solely at her office. Our investigators are always frustrated when the cases they poured their hearts into are declined. In my experience, the victims in these cases often feel the same.”