CMR is the leading provider
of funding and management
support for small to
medium-sized businesses and
entrepreneurs
Established 1984 C MR
is the leading venture
capital, management
support and business
services provider for
small to medium-sized
businesses - linking
excellent management
skills with the
substantial financial
resources of a global bank
of private investors.
CMR has over 450 senior
executives, operating
in the UK, USA, Europe, Asia,
Australasia and
globally,
providing both funding and
specialist help for
entrepreneurial
businesses .
For Businesses
CMR provides excellent
resources:
CMR FundEX Business Exchange - gives all companies & entrepreneurs direct access to CMR's global investor base.
CMR Catalyst Group
Programme -
transform
profitability through
merging.
CMR Company Sales Division helps owners to exit
at the best price.
CMR Corporate Recovery
Division -
experts in rescue and
turnaround.
CMR Technology Licensing
Division -
commercialising
innovation.
CMR Executive
Professionals - management support
and consultancy.
CMR Executives-on-Demandâ„¢ Fully experienced
senior executives
available quickly and
cost effectively.
We always welcome
contact with new
business clients- please get in touch
- we will do our
best to match
your needs and exceed
your expectations.
For Investors
Preferential access to new opportunities for investment and/or acquisition
P re-vets
propositions and
provides a
personalised service
to our investors
Syndication service
enabling investors to
link together as desired
Executive and
management support for
investments as needed
CMR's services to
our investors are not
only fast & efficient
but also free
W e
always appreciate new
members- you are welcome
to join as an investor
or as a CMR Executive.
When you
join us as a Senior
Executive:
CMR's strength is in the
skills and experience of
our executive members -
all senior, director level
people with years of
successfully running and
managing companies.
Because the demand for
CMR's support and services
is ever-increasing,
especially as we enter
recessionary times, we
have a growing need for
more high calibre
executives to join us from
every industry and
discipline.
You will be using your
considerable experience to
help smaller businesses
and entrepreneurs to grow
profitably.
We offer full training
and mentoring support to
help maximise potential.
We are
always keen to find more
high calibre senior
executives in all areas-
skills and location.
Make contact with us today
and maximise your
opportunities.
HEAD
OFFICE
124 City Road
London EC1 2NX
Tel: +44 (0)207-636-1744
Fax:+44 (0)207-636-5639
Email: cmr@cmruk.com
Registered Office:
124 City Road ,
London EC1 2NX
Also Glasgow,
Dublin, Switzerland, Europe, USA/Canada
Privacy Statement: CMR only
retains personal details
supplied directly by executives
joining CMR themselves either as
Full Executive Members or
Interim Management Members or
Investors. Those details are
only used within CMR and not
disclosed to any third parties
without that person’s
agreement. We will keep that
data until requested by the
person to be removed – at that
point it will be deleted.
Personal data is never sold or
used for purposes outside of
CMR’s normal operations. Any
correspondence should be
directed to the Managing
Director, CMR,
Kemp House,
152-160 City Road, London EC1V
2N
Senior Executives
CMR is a worldwide network of senior executives. Join us to expand your career and business horizons.
Business Entrepreneurs
CMR has a complete range of resources & services provided by experts to help all businesses to grow and prosper.
Investors & Venturers
CMR has a continuous stream of business and funding propositions, which are matched to investor preferences. Join us - it's FREE!
FundEX
FundEX is CMR's worldwide stock market for small to medium sized companies and entrepreneurs to raise new capital.
Interim & Permanent Management
Many of CMR's executives can be recruited on an interim, permanent or NED basis.
Login
Main CMR Intranet members only
Regional Intranets
Sat, 13 Jun 2026 23:15:00 +0000 Hillary Clinton Fears "Revolution" Preventing The US From Becoming A "Rainbow Nation"
Hillary Clinton Fears "Revolution" Preventing The US From Becoming A "Rainbow Nation"
The word "Democracy" is thrown around frequently within progressive circles as a call to arms; a rallying cry based on a fraudulent narrative of p
Read more.....
Hillary Clinton Fears "Revolution" Preventing The US From Becoming A "Rainbow Nation"
The word "Democracy" is thrown around frequently within progressive circles as a call to arms; a rallying cry based on a fraudulent narrative of patriotic duty. Throughout the entirety of Joe Biden's first and last term, the political left painted conservatives as a threat to democracy. Anyone who opposed pandemic mandates, compelled vaccination, open borders, mass immigration, gender ideology in public schools etc., was labeled a danger to society.
The inherent fallacy being that leftists (and by extension Democrats) represent the majority of the nation. However, this notion has been consistently debunked by multiple elections, polls and the fact that the vast majority of liberal movements have been exposed as astroturf funded by NGOs.
If Democrats actually cared about democracy, they would listen to the actual American majority, instead of waging a propaganda war on the majority in order to manufacture a false consensus. And, the majority of Americans do not support multicultural or "intersectional" ideology. The liberal vision is on the decline and that's a good thing.
Not surprisingly, Hillary Clinton disagrees.
At the first Rainbow PUSH Coalition conference since the death of Reverend Jesse Jackson in February. Pete Buttigieg and Hillary Clinton took to the stage in front of a small audience in Chicago this week to sell their Utopian future, but mostly they slandered the Trump Administration. Their rhetoric continues to echo the message of the Biden era, that conservatives want the end of civil rights and voting rights in the US.
Buttigieg asserted that the Trump Administration was "corrupt" and "corruption is bad".
VIDEO
The former DOT Secretary makes no mention of the fact that he shares a stage with Clinton, widely known as one of the most corrupt politicians in recent American history. While Democrats spend endless media time trying to tie Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, it's the Clinton Family that is well documented as being truly friendly with the globalist pedo pimp. Around 90% of Epstein's political contributions went to the Democratic Party including multiple donations to Hillary Clinton. None of his donations went to Trump.
Buttigieg faced extensive backlash for his handling of the pandemic lockdowns, including his avid support for draconian mandates which were ultimately found to be useless in stopping the spread of covid; and all over a virus with a 99.8% average survival rate. He continues to echo the party line, calling for rigging of the Supreme Court to ensure Democrat supremacy.
Buttigieg is expected to run in the 2028 Democrat primaries for President. Though, he lacks any mainstream popularity and, like most Democrats, he continues to campaign as if he's running against Trump even though Trump is leaving office.
Clinton, on the other hand, seems less concerned with Trump and far more concerned with the larger conservative and anti-woke movements which have left Democrats stunned and bewildered. Clinton calls these movements a "counter-revolution" which she believes is undermining the liberal order established over the last several decades.
Clinton fearmongers with the usual rhetoric, claiming that civil rights and voting rights are under threat.
She is ostensibly referencing the end of redistricting using race-based gerrymandering, which exclusively worked in the favor of Democrats. But, this was enforced by the Supreme Court, not Trump or the MAGA movement. Clinton is also a vocal opponent of the Save Act, which would make proof of citizenship a requirement for voting in the US (a bill which is supported by around 80% of American voters).
Her comments on the "Rainbow Nation" might be confusing for those who don't understand what this entails. Jackson used "Rainbow" to describe a broad coalition of "marginalized groups" (Black Americans, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, LGBTQ+ people, low wage workers, etc.) uniting for political power and social justice. His organization commonly promotes Marxist "intersectionality" and multiculturalism.
Clinton has made similar anti-populist statements in recent months, arguing that the rise of American conservatism has the potential to break apart the liberal west. At the Munich Security Conference in February, she participated in panels on what they call the “West-West Divide”, warning of democratic backsliding on human rights (including women’s and LGBTQ+ rights), and authoritarian dangers.
Clinton called for civil rights and grassroots networks to counter the weakening of liberal institutions. She made the same call for popular opposition in Chicago.
“We have to reconstitute the movements that moved us forward, that made it possible to claim we were trying to get to that more perfect union. They were not led by politically elected officials. They were led by clergy, they were led by business leaders, they were led by civic organizers, they were led by young people. So we don’t need to have a bunch of elected officials leading this new movement. We need to have it be from the bottom up, the grassroots, coming back to get organized and move forward again.”
In other words, if they can't win (or steal) the elections and if they can't gain the majority approval of the voters, then they will turn to mob actions to disrupt reforms and force the public to accept woke ideology anyway. Democrats only romanticize democracy when it works in their favor. When it doesn't, they completely abandon it.
Tyler Durden Sat, 06/13/2026 - 19:15 Close Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:40:00 +0000 AI's Core Flaw: "Mass Regurgitation Of Misinformation"
AI's Core Flaw: "Mass Regurgitation Of Misinformation"
AI's Core Flaw: "Mass Regurgitation Of Misinformation"
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
These immense hidden costs will not show up in GDP until they collapse the entire house of speculative gambling cards propping up the global economy.
I approach all AI topics with several things in mind. One is the nature of problems , which implicitly define what qualifies as solutions , and the resulting incentive to define the "problem" such that the "solution" happens to be the one we own and control.
So the "problem" AI solves is "corporate profits are too low," and so the "solution" is to replace costly human labor (made costlier by SickCare insurance and taxes on labor) with "cheaper" AI (cheaper because the full costs are hidden or subsidized).
My other lens: the economic, social and cultural consequences of AI as it is and AI hype , a topic I've explored most recently in Is AI Reversing Anti-Progress or Is It Accelerating It? , AI Data Centers Are Not the Railroads of Today and Inequality, AI and Digital Life Are Undermining Society .
Correspondent Mike Fasano recently submitted a succinct and telling summary of AI's insurmountable structural flaw : AI's inability to discern the difference between truth and falsehood, be it intentional misdirection / misinformation or errors generated by AI hallucinations, a systemic flaw which he summarized as mass regurgitation of misinformation :
* * *
"I read you post on AI and railroads. Here is another observation.
So far, AI has only regurgitative intelligence. It--at best--can collate and respond to queries on masses of acquired data.
But what if that data is wrong?
Who now believes the inflation or unemployment statistics? Virtually every human knows that those statistics are false.
Does AI know that?
And the problem goes much deeper.
The former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, Marcia Angell, noted:
'It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.'
That being the case, can we rely up AI medical advice?
And that problem goes beyond medicine. It is now generally conceded that the inability to replicate scientific studies of any type has give rise to a 'replicability crisis' in science. Can we trust 'science' that cannot be proven to be accurate?
Any adult past the age of 40 knows that the above listing of questionable information sources is just the tip of the iceberg. We live in a sea of 'official' but false data.
Railroads could transport grain to cities, minerals to factories, manufactured goods to those needing those goods. That served a public purpose.
But what is the use of the mass regurgitation of misinformation? And is anyone subtracting the losses engendered by the utilization of inaccurate information from GDP?"
* * *
Thank you, Mike, for clarifying an essential point: the foundation of all "value" is fact, truth, accuracy and the transparency, replicability and accountability of the processes validating fact, truth, accuracy. If AI is incapable by its nature of validating all these, it's worse than useless--it's destructive on a system-wide scale.
The evidence of the systemic destruction is already overwhelming. Bogus "scientific papers" are already proliferating at an accelerating rate, making the task of identifying incorrect and fabricated (i.e. hallucinated by AI) data, processes and conclusions impossible due to the scale of the misinformation and the difficulty of identifying the misinformation buried inside superficially legitimate papers.
With both scientific and economic data and analysis now untrustworthy without exceedingly expensive, time-consuming vetting by human experts, where does this leave the "AI will automatically generate superabundance" hype? What's already clear--but inconvenient--is the mass adoption of inherently flawed AI is undermining the foundations of "value," however we wish to define it.
And as Mike also points out, this undermining of value has a financial consequence. We all know Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a superficial, distorting measure of "prosperity," and the structural distortions of GDP (Waste Is Growth ) are amplified by the hidden destruction of transparency, replicability and accountability by AI slop, whether intentional (malicious, deceptive, fraudulent) or as the unavoidable consequence of AI's core flaw.
These immense hidden costs will not show up in GDP until they collapse the entire house of speculative gambling cards propping up the global economy. Only then will the structural damage being wrought by our increasing reliance on tools that cannot discern the difference between fact and fantasy / fabrication / hallucination become visible.
And by then, of course, the damage will be irreversible without extraordinary costs and sacrifices , sacrifices few will volunteer to bear.
Remember that AI isn't "thinking," "understanding" or "making judgments": AI tools are engines of linguistic automation, not engines of understanding. The simulation is not the thing simulated. AI is not a "mind," it is a prompt and a probability distribution.
Tyler Durden Sat, 06/13/2026 - 18:40 Close Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:05:00 +0000 What's In A Name? Alaska GOP Succeeds In Stopping Democrats From Stealing The Senate Election
What's In A Name? Alaska GOP Succeeds In Stopping Democrats From Stealing The Senate Election
Alaska's election officials may have just saved a U.S. Senate seat from one of the more brazen ballot schemes in recent memory. T
Read more.....
What's In A Name? Alaska GOP Succeeds In Stopping Democrats From Stealing The Senate Election
Alaska's election officials may have just saved a U.S. Senate seat from one of the more brazen ballot schemes in recent memory. The state's Division of Elections issued a preliminary ruling this week that Dan J. Sullivan of Petersburg is ineligible to appear on the 2026 Senate ballot , dealing a significant blow to Democrats - in what Republicans have characterized as a coordinated Democratic effort to siphon votes from incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan through deliberate name confusion.
US Senator Dan Sullivan (R) Dan J. Sullivan is a 69-year-old retired teacher who filed to run as a Republican for the U.S. Senate mere days before the late-May filing deadline. Not only is his name virtually identical to the incumbent senator's, but he's also recycled the incumbent's former campaign slogan, and is using a logo similar to the senator's own branding. The attempt to deceive voters is obvious, and under Alaska's ranked-choice voting system, where ballot position and name recognition carry outsized weight, the potential for voter confusion was significant and consequential
According to a report from the Anchorage Daily News, Carol Beecher, director of the Division of Elections, made the state's position clear in a letter to Dan J. Sullivan on Wednesday. "Based on a review of the evidence presented and in the Division's possession, the Division has determined that the preponderance of evidence does not support your eligibility for the office of United States Senator ," Beecher wrote.
The ruling is preliminary, with the fake Sullivan given until 5 p.m. Thursday to submit additional evidence before the division issues its final decision.
Sullivan's response to scrutiny has been consistent and unconvincing . He denied coordinating with Democratic operatives and presented himself as a legitimate independent GOP candidate, but he also refused to submit a sworn affidavit requested by Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, who announced Monday that the state was investigating his candidacy and warned him he could face exposure for perjury if his sworn answers proved false.
Sullivan called the allegations baseless, argued Dahlstrom's questions were irrelevant, and insisted the state had no "credible basis" to remove him from the ballot. On Thursday morning, after receiving the preliminary ineligibility notice the night before, Sullivan said he would not be available for comment and added, "We decide where we go next."
The paper trail contradicts Sullivan's denials. According to voter registration records attached to formal complaints filed by the Alaska Republican Party, the fake Sullivan listed his party affiliation as "undeclared" as recently as March 26, 2026. Before 2024, he had consistently been listed as undeclared or nonpartisan. Last year, he was affiliated with the Alaskan Independence Party.
Carmela Warfield, chair of the Alaska Republican Party, signed the complaints and charged that Sullivan misrepresented his party affiliation when he filed on May 29. One complaint states, "Despite never having registered as affiliated with the Republican Party, Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.'s declaration swears he is a registered Republican," and calls for his declaration to be rejected.
There is also evidence of coordination with Peltola. When the fake Sullivan issued a press release announcing his candidacy, a PDF of that release showed in its metadata that its author was Amber Lee, a left-wing consultant whom the New York Times has described as a supporter of Rep. Mary Peltola, the Democratic former congresswoman and Sen. Sullivan's top challenger in the 2026 race. Peltola's campaign has denied any involvement. Given that the candidate's own press release traced back to a Peltola ally, that denial falls flat.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee moved aggressively on multiple fronts, urging election officials to keep Sullivan off the ballot by citing Alaska rules prohibiting ballot listings that are "confusing or misleading to voters." The NRSC separately asked the Federal Election Commission to investigate and potentially refer the matter to the Department of Justice, alleging his campaign materials mimicked the senator's and that he had previously donated to Democrats, including Peltola herself. Sen. Dan Sullivan and the NRSC have both characterized the Petersburg Sullivan as a sham candidate coordinated with Democratic allies to dilute the incumbent's vote share ahead of the August 18 primary.
The left's fingerprints are all over this. A retired teacher with no real political history, no Republican registration, an Alaskan Independence Party affiliation from last year, a history of donating to Democrats, a press release authored by a Peltola supporter, a logo that mimics the incumbent senator's branding, and a candidacy filed at the last possible moment.
Ranked-choice voting was always going to make Alaska a prime target for ballot manipulation. The ranked-choice voting system enabled Peltola to be elected to Congress in Alaska in 2022, despite Republican candidates receiving more cumulative votes.
Tyler Durden Sat, 06/13/2026 - 18:05 Close Sat, 13 Jun 2026 21:30:00 +0000 Bitcoin & The Clash Of Two Inexorable Realities
Bitcoin & The Clash Of Two Inexorable Realities
Bitcoin & The Clash Of Two Inexorable Realities
Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,
Two inexorable realities have come into sharpened focus over the last month or so.
Both are themes we have been exploring and monitoring – one, since practically the very beginning of this service, the other, over the last year or so.
The first is the unsustainable nature of the global monetary system : we are not unique in calling that out – it’s practically a trope and has been for a long time.
The other is the existential necessity to win the new arms race – which is less about kinetic weapons now and more about computation, information and 5GW.
In the past, when the Soviet Union put as astronaut into space before NASA, it was a humiliation and a psychological defeat – but the USA arguably still held strategic advantage where it counted at the time, which was here on earth, with more nuclear missiles, tanks and military bases than the USSR.
The US space program kicked into overdrive, and NASA was able to slingshot past the Russians, and over time and across more dimensions, the Soviets never caught back up or retook the lead – in anything.
To this day, Russia’s resurgence onto the world stage – articulated through concepts such as Neo-Eurasionism or “Third Rome” (basically their version of “Manifest Destiny”) – is more than anything, an aspirational framework for “getting up to speed”, while rationalizing their inability to do so in traditionalist, volk-ish trappings.
Their high priest of this quixotic mix, is “Fourth Political Theory” author, university professor and philosopher, Alexander Dugin – whose other titles include “Last War of the World-Island” and – perhaps most tellingly, although least known of his works here in the West – “Katechon and Revolution”.
The word “Katechon” (from the Greek: ? ?at???? / t? ?at???? which translates loosely as “the Restrainer”) is important in the Russian collective psyche because it contains a massive “tell”.On its surface, it’s supposed to encompass Russia’s “state messianism” and symbolize its opposition to The West – their “Antikeimenos”.
The day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Dugin posted on Facebook “Now we are in a war of the spirits. Katechon vs. Antekeimenos”.
Antikeimenos (from the Greek: ? ??t??e?µe???) is the term St. Paul uses in Thessalonians 2:4 for the figure of the Antichrist. It appears exactly once in the Greek New Testament, in that single verse. The literal sense is “the one who opposes” or “the one set against”.
And therein lays “the tell” – what the Russian collective psyche is admitting to, and trying to come to grips with, and it is this:
If we reframe the Cold War as the first technological contest between Great Powers, Russia has to confront the fact that they lost – and they’ve never been able to recover from it.
In the contemporary pantheon of international relations and political economy, absolutely nobody today thinks of Russia as a “great power”. When you peel back the ideations of “The Fifth Empire” or “The Soviet Union 2.0”, you get to that underlying underdog mentality – trying to recapture super-power status.
They lost the space race. Then the Cold War, and now they can’t even beat the Ukraine.
That was supposed to be an overwhelming military victory, but the Ukrainians, mainly through wholesale adoption of drone warfare, have managed to give the invaders a rough time of it, even penetrating deep into Russian territory using high-altitude balloons to deliver suicide drones.
Make no mistake, all that financial support from the West aside, the Ukrainians have been able to stave off complete defeat through technological means and because cheap, sophisticated weaponry (drones) completely upended the conventional battlefield.Such are the travails of an erstwhile great power that has lost a technological competition. You can bet today’s incumbents – namely the USA and China – understand these stakes, and neither of them has any intention of losing:
AI
Energy
High Performance Computing (which leads us into)
The Space Race 2.0
Quantum Computing
This is why the “catastrophic climate change” narrative has been rather suddenly sunsetted in The West (at least, the non-Euro west): we need more energy, including nuclear – lots, and lots of nuclear.
It’s why White House Asset Management (WHAM) is pumping money into quantum computing companies (including, from our wish list: D-Wave, which we hadn’t yet pulled the trigger on).
It’s also why China has moved further out on the interventionist side of the state capitalism spectrum, with mandated “Capital Reallocation” programs where the government has issued structural directives forcing state-owned pensions, insurance funds, and enterprise pools to funnel trillions of yuan directly into equities, while the state-backed “National Team” continues steady, strategic purchases of domestic ETFs to put a floor under major indices.
The Chinese debt overhang on bad real estate loans is even larger than what we had here in the run up to the GFC, so regulators there are pulling out all the stops to keep the balloon duct-taped together:In early 2026, Beijing quietly abolished enforcement of its strict “three red lines” policy. Developers are no longer required to report monthly data regarding debt-to-equity, cash, and asset metrics, freeing up fresh credit channels.
They’ve backstopped an additional 7 trillion yuan under a new “property project whitelist” mechanism, which extends developer loan maturities by up to five additional years to stave off defaults.
Commercial and state banks are aggressively financed to help local governments buy up unsold, completed housing inventory directly from developers to convert them into subsidized public housing (this is a nominally communist country, so why not).
To top it all off, we’re seeing capital flight restrictions – going so far as to prevent technology transfers to the West via acquisition (we covered last month how Meta’s acquisition of Manus was blocked and reversed by state authorities).
Any rational observer of finance and economics knows that all world economies, including The World Economy, is levitating in mid-air buoyed by stimulus, signal suppression and pure white-knuckled will.
In prior years, when all the financial commentators and contrarians were waiting for this to hit a wall, we all marvelled (at least I did) how the system was kept on the rails at all costs – because too much was riding on it to let rational economics and market restructuring take their course.
That was before AI. Before it became apparent that not being number one in this technological arms race had civilizational consequences, like joining Russia as another “also-ran”.
Once again, the contradictions and distortions that this imperative amplifies are bubbling to the surface.
On one hand – all rational analysis of the market is screaming “ overbought”. Practically every financial commentator I came up following is looking at this and making comparisons with the dot-com bubble; the AI high flyers now look a lot like Global Crossing, Nortel, L3, VA Linux before they all imploded.
My X feed is absolutely jam-packed with people posting screenshots of 7-figure trading accounts that were ostensibly amassed in under a year trading HPC, AI, chip makers, memory, and now quantum (again).
ZeroHedge has remarked on the circular nature of the AI economy more than once:
Note that the above-linked article (from which the screenshot came) is a Tyler Durden original, it is not a repost of somebody else’s article.
Tyler has this annoying trait: he’s always early and he’s often right.
Yet it’s possible the man himself buried the lede (from that screen cap):
“The Infinite Money Glitch”
By all rational and financially coherent measures, the equities markets are overvalued, beyond bubble levels and primed for a catastrophic drop on the order of, pick one, 50%, 75%, 90%. Yes. 90%. We’ve been pumping since 2008 folks. Even further if you go back to the beginning of the equities supercycle in 1982.
After the dot-com bust, we were in a bear market for two years. When the GFC finally hit, it was straight down for a good 18 months. When COVID was coming, the banking system was starting to crack up under the hood (the reverse repo situation in late 2019) but when it came unglued in March, it was about two weeks before the monetary bazookas were unleashed and everything reversed hard of the March low.
What happens after that is instructive:
The Regional Banking crisis erupted, and was even larger in nominal terms than the GFC when it came to the amount of assets tied to bank failures. The Fed threw the taper overboard, did a massive liquidity injection and after a failed attempt to pick and choose winners in terms of which banks to save, caved in to public uproar and backstopped everything.
Liberation Day, Japan-ageddon, Israel/Iran/Gaza barely perturb the trajectory.
If you switch out of linear mode for that long-term chart, and go to logarithmic – you should recognize the pattern:
It’s the same as Bitcoin, which is the same as gold during the Weimar Republic and it’s the same signal being broadcast from every one of those charts.
We should acknowledge that the Nasdaq took 15 years to recover from the Dotcom shakeout, which is a long time to be underwater if you bought in at the tippy-top.
But I believe two things have changed since the GFC:
The first is that tech, despite taking the biggest hit, almost by definition when the Dotcom bubble blew, also became the apex asset class from here on out.
If you look at the long-term chart for the Nasdaq, it basically went parabolic for the first half of the equities supercycle, and formed a double-bottom from the Dotcom crash to the GFC
After that it blasted off and has left everything else in its dust:
This makes perfect sense, because tech is the asset class of choice in a world driven by acceleration and tachyosis.
We can’t put Bitcoin in that chart because it’s basically a divide by zero error. But if we take the commonly held, first market price ever for Bitcoin, which was $0.10, it pencils out to an absurd value. Call it 77,719,900% and leave it there.
It’s not uncommon to hear criticisms of Bitcoin that are simply “all it does is follow tech”.
Yeah, no shit. That’s because it is tech.
The other thing I believe about all this, is Raoul Pal’s theory that after the GFC, the world’s central banks got together and made a deal to never let anything like that happen, ever again.
Which means that central bank balance sheets will grow in perpetuity, and stock market will never have a meaningful bear market – for the remainder of the duration of the current monetary system:
That’s from Raoul Pal’s “Everything Code”, it goes on:
They don’t understand valuations are a function of debasement.
They don’t understand why technology rises and valuations can keep rising.
They don’t understand why crypto is being adopted and is the fastest horse in the race.
They don’t understand why the dollar keeps rising.
They don’t understand that energy transition is real and is crucial for the world economy.
They don’t understand why rates won’t remain high.
They don’t understand why GPT4/AI is the biggest humanity-scale event since the splitting of the atom.
They don’t understand why this is all so fucking deflationary. They want their sticky inflation. They will not get it.
They don’t understand why nothing in their world makes sense.
We understand it. Because we know the cheat code, which is:
Put the chart into logarithmic view.
Look at the X axis.
Then own the assets that are outpacing everything else on that scale.
That’s it.
Get on the Bombthrower mailing list here . Premium members of The Sovereign Capitalist have already received advance copies of my new book: The Blueprint: Survive and Thrive in an Overclocked Timeline – we launch in two weeks, get on the invite list here. Follow me on X here.
Tyler Durden Sat, 06/13/2026 - 17:30 Close Sat, 13 Jun 2026 20:20:00 +0000 Canadian Mother Sues OpenAI, Alleging Chatbot Encouraged Daughter's Suicide
Canadian Mother Sues OpenAI, Alleging Chatbot Encouraged Daughter's Suicide
Canadian Mother Sues OpenAI, Alleging Chatbot Encouraged Daughter's Suicide
Authored by Jacob Burg via The Epoch Times ,
A Canadian mother is suing OpenAI after its popular ChatGPT chatbot allegedly encouraged her daughter to continue engaging with the app after she revealed suicidal thoughts.
A screen showing the ChatGPT app. Oleksii Pydsosonnii/The Epoch Times Instead of terminating these discussions or flagging her account for safety concerns, ChatGPT allegedly escalated the exchanges in the days before the woman ultimately took her life, according to a press release.
The Social Media Victims Law Center, Tech Justice Law, and the firm Susman Godfrey filed a lawsuit in San Francisco County Superior Court against OpenAI on June 11 on behalf of Kristie Carrier.
Her daughter, Alice Carrier, 24, committed suicide on July 2, 2025 . After reviewing her daughter's devices, Kristie Carrier said she had found extensive conversations with ChatGPT in which her daughter expressed thoughts of self-harm in the months before her death.
In the exchanges, her daughter allegedly told the chatbot that she was feeling isolated and discussed possible suicide methods . The lawsuit accuses ChatGPT of escalating these conversations in the days before the woman's suicide, rather than terminating the exchange or flagging her account "for human intervention," the press release states.
These exchanges allegedly encouraged Alice Carrier to continue engaging with ChatGPT, causing "her further isolation from her human support system and ultimately, suicide," according to a press release.
"If a person came up to me, and they were clearly in distress and sharing their thoughts of suicide, I would be expected to help them, not encourage them to fixate on their depressive thoughts or isolate themselves," Kristie Carrier said in the press release.
"The same should be true of OpenAI. Instead, OpenAI has chosen to put out a product that was unsafe, and that they knew was unsafe but they did so without any concern for the consequences of their choices. Sam Altman can continue to go about his life normally, but my life is missing a child. This is unacceptable," she added.
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.
This is not the first time, nor the second time, a parent has sued OpenAI, accusing its chatbot of encouraging their child to commit suicide.
Last year, the Social Media Victims Law Center and the Tech Justice Law Project filed seven lawsuits against the AI giant, claiming ChatGPT had isolated multiple users from their support systems, and in some cases, coached the victims into taking their own lives.
Matthew Raine testified to Congress in September 2025 after suing OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman.
Raine alleged that his son, Adam, took his own life after ChatGPT mentioned suicide more than 1,200 times to the 16-year-old. He accused ChatGPT of offering specific methods to his son on how to die by suicide, and continuing to validate and encourage the boy's feelings.
"As parents, you cannot imagine what it's like to read a conversation with a chatbot that groomed your child to take his own life," Raine told lawmakers at the time.
Justin Nelson, a partner at Susman Godfrey, said on June 11 that OpenAI's "deliberate design decisions" led to Alice Carrier's suicide.
"Instead of providing help, OpenAI encouraged suicidal behavior. This lawsuit is about accountability for OpenAI's actions," he said in the press release.
Tyler Durden Sat, 06/13/2026 - 16:20 Close Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:45:00 +0000 Watch: Humanoid Warbot Live-Fires Mortars At Vegas Test Range
Watch: Humanoid Warbot Live-Fires Mortars At Vegas Test Range
Watch: Humanoid Warbot Live-Fires Mortars At Vegas Test Range
It is not just one-way attack drones (read JPMorgan report ) operating on AI-enabled kill chains that human soldiers have to worry about on the modern battlefield. We have been laying out this story and were among the first to point out that humanoid robots are not only entering factory floors and warehouses, but are also moving toward the battlefield.
San Francisco-based robotics company Foundation Future Industries is developing a "dual-use" humanoid robot called the "Phantom MK1," designed for heavy manufacturing, logistics, and the military.
The defense angle for the Phantom MK1 is quite simple: replace the human soldier with the robot for close-quarters battle (CQB) operations, including breaching and room-clearing support.
Beyond CQB, a never-before-seen video now shows the Phantom MK1 operating a mobile light mortar system during a live-fire training exercise in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Phantom MK1
To better understand the Foundation's position, we reached out for comment. The company responded with the following statement:
The US military has backed Foundation in over $73M on grants and contracts to develop their robot to this point.
Although many of the use cases they've worked on have been logistics-focused, the ultimate goal has always been kinetic use cases .
Although drones and UGVs have been promising new robots on the Ukrainian battlefield, humanoids are the only robot being built that promises to interact with the entire fleet and arsenal of human weapons and vehicles.
Launching mortars and soon breaching doors have become near-term proofs of humanoids moving from logistics to kinetic engagements.
Watch Phantom MK1
In February, we outlined that humanoid robots would soon move onto the modern battlefield, not just factory floors and warehouses. A little more than a month later, TIME picked up on that reporting. More recently, CNBC followed with a piece titled, "This Trump-linked startup plans to put humanoid robots in the military."
Foundation co-founder and CEO Sankaet Pathak recently said that a humanoid-soldier arms race is "already happening, " as Russia and China develop dual-use technology.
Phantom MK1 Holding 9mm Pistol
"Just like drones, machine guns, or any technology, you first have to get them into the hands of customers ," Pathak said.
You're getting a front-row seat to what the 2030s battlefieldread report ).
Tyler Durden Sat, 06/13/2026 - 15:45 Close Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:10:00 +0000 Trump Mulls Farmer Aid As Fertilizer And Fuel Costs Bite
Trump Mulls Farmer Aid As Fertilizer And Fuel Costs Bite
Trump Mulls Farmer Aid As Fertilizer And Fuel Costs Bite
Authored by Owen Evans via The Epoch Times ,
President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he is considering support for U.S. farmers struggling with high fertilizer prices , as rising energy costs and market volatility continue to squeeze producers across the farm belt.
A farm field near West Bend, Iowa, on May 6, 2026. Scott Olson/Getty Images "I am looking at doing a form of help ," Trump told reporters at the White House, without giving details.
Farmers face pressure from fertilizer and fuel costs, both of which have been affected by the conflict with Iran and disruption around the Strait of Hormuz, a key route for global energy and fertilizer trade.
Fertilizer prices have eased from recent highs, with granular urea prices in New Orleans falling to $453.50 per short ton, their lowest level since Feb. 6, reported Bloomberg Green Markets on June 8.
That was down 36 percent from a mid-April peak.
The market remains vulnerable to disruption, particularly because urea is the most widely used nitrogen fertilizer and nearly half of global urea exports come from countries affected by the Middle East conflict.
High fuel prices have also hit farmers.
Diesel prices reached record highs in parts of the Midwest in May, including Indiana and Illinois, due to the Iran war. Grain and soybean farmers are especially exposed because diesel is needed for tractors, combines, irrigation, and crop transport.
The pressure in farming has become a heated political issue in Washington.
At a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing on June 10, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) challenged Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins over whether Trump administration policies had increased farmers' costs.
"Georgia farmers are telling me that they continue to struggle with high costs, costs exacerbated by President Trump's war in Iran, and his tariffs - which is a tax on all of us on virtually everything," Warnock said.
Warnock said that the administration had lowered tariffs on some farm equipment and asked whether that move was an acknowledgement that tariffs had raised the cost of farming.
However, Rollins defended the administration's record, saying it was working to reduce the agricultural trade deficit.
"We're cutting that $50 billion agricultural trade deficit in half that we inherited a year and a half ago, " she said.
Warnock pressed again, asking whether tariffs had increased costs for farmers, saying Rollins was "forecasting" future results rather than answering the question.
Rollins said that the Trump administration is "reshoring fertilizer back to America."
"In two or three weeks, we're going to break ground in Louisiana on what will be the largest fertilizer plant in the world," she said.
In May, farmers called for emergency relief and adoption of key bills to stem soaring fertilizer costs.
"American farmers are price-takers on both ends, paying monopoly prices for inputs they must buy, then accepting commodity prices they cannot control, with no pricing power on either side," Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) said during a May 12 Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee hearing.
"That's not a market. It's a trap for the American farmers."
"Simply put, farmers need more competition in this marketplace," South Dakota Corn Growers Association president Trent Kubik said.
"Federal antitrust laws exist for precisely this reason - to promote and sustain competition, the lifeblood of our economy.
"Increased competition for more participants in the fertilizer manufacturing space is the only thing that can deliver meaningful and durable price relief."
The concern is not limited to the United States.
European Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen said this week that Europe needs long-term fertilizer solutions to avoid food shortages.
"We need to do our homework as well and address the issues to make fertilizers not only available but also affordable, because, otherwise, there will be food shortages in the European Union," Hansen told Euronews on June 10.
He said many European farmers were considering not planting because production had become too expensive and they could not easily pass on the costs.
Reuters and John Haughey contributed to this report.
Tyler Durden Sat, 06/13/2026 - 15:10 Close Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:00:00 +0000 Former NIH Head Secretly Helped With Paper Dismissing Theory COVID-19 Came From Lab
Former NIH Head Secretly Helped With Paper Dismissing Theory COVID-19 Came From Lab
Former NIH Head Secretly Helped With Paper Dismissing Theory COVID-19 Came From Lab
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times ,
Then-National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Francis Collins , around the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, acknowledged that he secretly assisted with a paper stating the virus that causes COVID-19 "is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," according to a newly released missive.
Dr. Francis Collins speaks in Washington on Sept. 9, 2020. Michael Reynolds/Getty Images "This is work that Tony, Jeremy, Larry, and I helped with, but are appropriately not mentioned explicitly in the paper," Collins said in the March 6, 2020, email to NIH officials, which was released by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on June 11.
Tony refers to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime head of the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases through late 2022. Jeremy refers to Jeremy Farrar, at the time the director of the Wellcome Trust. Larry refers to Dr. Lawrence Tabak, an NIH official.
Collins noted the conclusion that stated, "The analysis of public genome sequence data from SARS-CoV-2 and related viruses found no evidence that the virus was made in a laboratory or otherwise engineered." SARS-CoV-2 is the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
The first COVID-19 cases appeared in Wuhan, China, in 2019, near a laboratory that was conducting enhanced experiments on coronaviruses funded by the NIH.
Collins was responding to an email from Kristian Andersen, one of the authors of the paper, which was titled "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2." Andersen and other scientists said in the paper, published on March 17, 2020, in Nature Medicine, that they analyzed data and concluded that it came from nature.
To date, no natural source has been identified for the virus. The Trump administration maintains the virus came from the Wuhan lab.
The paper did not mention any contributions from Collins, Fauci, Tabak, or Farrar, who made at least one critical change to the document, according to emails released by lawmakers in 2023. It thanked American virologist Michael Farzan "for discussions" and the Wellcome Trust "for support." Nature did not return a request for comment by the time of publication. Collins did not respond to a request for comment.
Collins told lawmakers in 2024 that his role "was for information, not for me to edit," that he never edited or suggested edits to the paper , and that, to his knowledge, neither did Fauci or Farrar. He also said he is not a virology expert.
Change In Stance
Early drafts of the paper had the authors stating that it was possible that the virus came from a lab. In private messages, since made public, the authors also said that characteristics of the virus indicated it was manmade. They have defended the changes in their stances as being driven by evidence.
In the newly released emails, Andersen, who has said that the paper was "prompted" by Collins, Fauci, and Farrar, had written to the trio.
"Thank you again for your advice and leadership as we have been working through the SARS-CoV-2 'origins' paper, " he said.
He told them he welcomed comments, suggestions, and questions about the paper, which had just been accepted for publication.
Collins said in a previously released email to Fauci, Tabak, and others in April 2020 that he was wondering whether the NIH could "help put down this very destructive conspiracy," linking to an article alleging the pandemic started in a lab in Wuhan.
"I hoped the Nature Medicine article on the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 would settle this," he said. "But probably didn't get much visibility. Anything more we can do? "
Collins told lawmakers in 2024 that in the email, "I meant that we should do what we can to get the truth out there, as opposed to statements that were reckless and speculative that were not based on evidence." He said that the possibility that the virus came from the lab, whether it originated there or not, was not a conspiracy theory.
Fauci Shared Another Paper
Fauci, who has denied allegations that Proximal Origins was written to disprove the lab origin theory, met on multiple occasions with intelligence officials in 2020 and 2021. James Erdman III, a CIA operations officer, told Paul and other senators in May that Fauci provided a list of experts to whom the intelligence community (IC) should talk, and that the list included the Proximal Origins authors.
"Dr. Anthony Fauci influenced the IC's analytic process and COVID origin's findings by leveraging his position to ensure the IC consulted with a conflicted list of curated Subject Matter Experts (SME), public health officials, and scientists," Erdman said.
Fauci has not returned emails seeking comment on Erdman's testimony and the missives Paul just released.
One of those emails showed Fauci wrote to Beth Cameron, a National Security Council official, on July 8, 2021, a day after he took part in a council briefing.
"The article accessible from the link in the subject line above just came out as a 'preprint' yesterday. It is from a group of highly qualified virologists," Fauci wrote. "Please show it to your team. It summarizes what I said yesterday."
The article, titled "The Origin of SARS-CoV-2," included Farrar and Anderson as coauthors. The authors said that there was "currently no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 has a laboratory origin" while there was evidence supporting links to animal markets in Wuhan.
Fauci "was pushing the natural-origin story while secretly getting classified briefings on the actual origins," Paul wrote in a post on X. "The American people were told one story. These documents - and a CIA officer's sworn testimony - tell another," he added in a follow-up post.
Tyler Durden Sat, 06/13/2026 - 14:00 Close Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:25:00 +0000 "Swift And Lethal": U.S. Southern Command Eliminates Tren De Aragua Kingpin In Venezuela
"Swift And Lethal": U.S. Southern Command Eliminates Tren De Aragua Kingpin In Venezuela
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth revealed late Friday that U.S. forces, working in coordination with Venezuelan security services, conducted a kin
Read more.....
"Swift And Lethal": U.S. Southern Command Eliminates Tren De Aragua Kingpin In Venezuela
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth revealed late Friday that U.S. forces, working in coordination with Venezuelan security services, conducted a kinetic strike on a Tren de Aragua compound inside Venezuela, killing the foreign terrorist organization's leader, Niño Guerrero.
The decapitation strike is part of the Trump administration's Western Hemisphere defense posturing of purging the Americas of transnational narco-terror networks and should put renewed focus on how TdA-linked gangsters are embedded inside the US, thanks to the Biden-Harris regime's nation-killing open orders.
"Earlier this week, the @DeptofWar — in full collaboration with Venezuelan security forces — conducted a kinetic strike on a Tren de Aragua (TdA) compound in Venezuela. TdA founder & leader Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, aka "Niño Guerrero," was confirmed killed during the strike," Hegseth wrote on X.
He added, "The operation underscores the shared U.S. and Venezuelan commitment to take the fight to narco-terrorists and deny them any safe haven in our hemisphere. We will continue to work closely with security partners, like Venezuela — and counties in the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition (A3C) partners — to take the fight to our enemies."
Guerrero, 43, had been indicted in New York on racketeering, terrorism, drug smuggling, and related charges. U.S. authorities had offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest. Prosecutors accused him of running TdA like a multinational crime syndicate, including laundering money through crypto, trafficking drugs and weapons, and directing violence across borders.
Federal prosecutors have associated TdA gangsters and affiliates with a sprawling criminal network that includes drug trafficking, firearms trafficking, sex trafficking, kidnapping, robbery, theft, fraud, extortion, and much more.
Related:
Odd move by Democratic lawmakers...
Last month, the Department of Justice said that TdA members and associates had been identified or arrested in Colorado, Tennessee, New York, Florida, Illinois, New Mexico, Washington, Georgia, Nebraska, Texas, and elsewhere.
The U.S. National Counterterrorism Center recently warned that the TdA presence in the U.S. operates as a decentralized transnational gang network, with more autonomous local leaders and fragmented cells after the group expanded beyond Venezuela and invaded the U.S under open borders.
Along with TdA and the removal of the Maduro regime in Venezuela, the U.S. has been escalating the fight against drug cartels in Mexico.
The U.S.-Mexico cartel fight has shifted from drug interdiction to counterterrorism-style operations, with US military and intelligence support helping Mexican special forces map, isolate, and dismantle command and control nodes of cartels before they can regenerate. Reuters previously reported that U.S. officials wanted Special Operations troops or CIA officers to accompany Mexican soldiers on raids against suspected fentanyl labs, while a newly formed U.S. military-led Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel reportedly aided Mexico's hunt for CJNG boss El Mencho through intelligence and target-package support.
Beyond purging FTOs and drug cartels from the Americas, the Trump administration has also played a crucial part in shifting the political landscape in countries from far-left leaders and unhinged socialists to center or, in Argentina's case, libertarian-right.
Related:
Trump's emerging strategy is clear: clean up the Western Hemisphere, purge cartels and socialists and Marxists, and ensure China does not gain ground.
One threat assessment question: whether the decapitation strike could raise the risk of TdA-linked retaliation inside the U.S.
Tyler Durden Sat, 06/13/2026 - 13:25 Close Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:00:00 +0000 President Trump Says Iran Peace Deal To Be Signed Sunday, Will Open Strait To All
President Trump Says Iran Peace Deal To Be Signed Sunday, Will Open Strait To All
President Trump Says Iran Peace Deal To Be Signed Sunday, Will Open Strait To All
Summary:
President Trump confirms that he is expecting to sign the US-Iran peace deal tomorrow (Sunday), opening the Strait to all
Pakistan PM confirms US and Iran have ?agreed to the final text of the agreement
IRGC continues to push back against deal
President Trump Says Iran Peace Deal To Be Signed Sunday, Will Open Strait To All
President Trump said a long-awaited deal to end the war in the Middle East is scheduled to be signed on Sunday, paving the way for the opening of the strategic Strait of Hormuz.
In a statement issued through Truth Social, President Trump first took a shot at President Obama:
Barack Hussein Obama’s Deal with Iran, the JCPOA, was an easy, beautiful, smooth road to a Nuclear Weapon, which Iran would have had six years ago, and would have used long before now.
Then explained why his deal is different:
My Agreement with Iran is the exact opposite, A WALL TO NO NUCLEAR WEAPON!
In fact, they no longer want a Nuclear Weapon, nor will they have one, either through purchase, development, or any other form of procurement.
The Deal is scheduled to get signed tomorrow, and immediately after it is signed, the Hormuz Strait is OPEN TO ALL.
Building relationships:
Our relationship with Iran is a much different and better one than previous Administrations have had.
Unlike Obama’s Hundreds of Billions of Dollars in payments to them, including 1.7 Billion Dollars in green, cold cash, no money will exchange hands.
We look forward to working with Iran, and the entire Middle East, long into the future.
About the nuclear dust:
At the appropriate time, when all is calm, we will go in and get the Nuclear Dust, buried deep under the powerful sunken granite mountains, thanks to our beautiful B-2 Bombers and their brilliant pilots, and downblend and destroy it, whether in Iran, or the United States.
...
Hopefully, this process will all work out quickly, easily, and smoothly.
If it doesn’t, we have the ultimate alternative, hopefully never to be used again!
Trump's statement, however, ran counter to Iran's foreign ministry which indicated earlier in the day that the deal would not be signed Sunday, according to state media reports.
We shall see...
Iran Peace Deal Signing Expected Within 24 Hours, Technical Talks To Follow, Pakistan's Sharif Says
After Friday witnessed a rare moment of agreement between Tehran and Washington saying that indeed a peace deal Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) is indeed 'very close' - there's been more color issued by Pakistan.
The country's Prime Minister Shehbaz ?Sharif said that the United States and ?Iran have ?agreed to the final text of the agreement, but that curiously Pakistan is now preparing for an electronic ?signing ?expected ?within the next 24 ?hours .
Is this going to be history's first Docusigned peace agreement?
Sharif further indicated this signing will be followed by ?technical-level ?talks this upcoming week - but this is definitely where the proverbial devil will be in the details.
Contained within the MoU signing will reportedly be an extension of the April 7 ceasefire by 60 days , during which the Strait of Hormuz would gradually reopen - or we should say that this is at least the very optimistic version of things, given that Tehran still insists that its military is in control of the Strait, which the Pentagon has flatly rejected is a a reality .
So Iran is seeking to hold on tightly to its obvious geographic leverage, while the US is rejecting that this is the case at all.
Another interesting possibly point of contention - but which looks to be merely papered over for now - is the status of the nuclear file, which has long been a major point of fierce contention.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi made clear Friday Iran's understanding that terms dealing with the country's nuclear program would be finalized in the 60 days after the initial agreement is signed . So in essence, this means Iran could get its wish of pushing nuclear negotiations back, only after the hot conflict has clearly ended. Iran has long sought to separate the issues of a final end to the war from consideration of its nuclear program.
Importantly Araghchi indicated the two sides could extend the 60-day period further, and a yet a lot could go wrong in such an extended interim. Still, it remains that Washington - and certainly the American public - doesn't have the appetite for an escalation that would lead to a boots-on-the-ground scenario complete with full regime change operations (and this means almost inevitable nation-building).
CNN earlier floated the possibility of peace being firmed up in a formal ceremony held in Geneva . The following Saturday report seems to lend credence to this as an impending scenario :
The foreign ministers of Pakistan and Switzerland expressed hopes of a breakthrough in peace negotiations to end the US war with Iran during a Saturday phone call , according to Islamabad's Foreign Ministry.
Though no further details were offered, the sides said they hoped the effort would contribute to regional peace and stability.
Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar and Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis reportedly agreed to maintain close contact ahead of talks expected to take place prior to an upcoming G7 summit in nearby Evian, France, from June 15-17.
IRGC and Deep Rifts Remain In iran
Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal is again alleging a familiar US narrative - that there are deep rifts within Iran over just how to respond to US deal-making efforts . The question is to what degree the civilian leadership actually holds the power to make final decisions, or also how tight a grip the IRGC holds over this process.
"Iran faces its own political dilemma in selling a deal to hard-liners in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who are steadfastly opposed to giving in to Trump’s demands for limits on its nuclear program , especially without upfront concessions from Washington," WSJ writes. "But it has absorbed damage during the war and from the U.S. blockade of the Persian Gulf, pushing Tehran toward an agreement."
In the meantime peace and red lines are still being hotly tested :
U.S. forces shot down multiple Iranian one-way attack drones heading toward the Strait of ?Hormuz , a source familiar with the ?matter told Reuters ?on Friday, in the latest ?military flare-up even as Washington and Tehran cite progress in peace ?talks.
The source, who ?spoke on condition ?of anonymity, said the drones had posed a ?threat to ?commercial traffic.
President ?Donald Trump had ?warned ?Iran earlier on Friday against firing ?more drones at ships attempting to transit ?the Strait, ?saying ?Tehran "better get their act together, and FAST!"
Iran's strategy has been to smell blood in the water and capitalize - sensing a bit of White House panic (the longer this drags on... quagmire being a key dreaded word), and so it has an interest in prolonging the economic pain and global energy shock toward exacting a pound of flesh from the Trump administration (so long as the Islamic Republic itself can survive the stand off).
Tyler Durden Sat, 06/13/2026 - 13:00 Close
Dotsquares