Month: July 2026

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge on July 30 declined to block new work requirements for Medicaid recipients that states must implement by Jan. 1, 2027.

Judge Richard Stearns of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts turned down a request for a preliminary injunction made by Massachusetts and 25 other states to block the work requirements as the states’ legal challenge proceeds.

Stearns said in a six-page decision that the harms about which the states complained—added costs to comply with the new requirements—are largely reimbursable, since the federal government has said it will pay for 90 percent of the costs.

States have also complained that officials face a “tight timeline” to implement the requirements, which include mandating that beneficiaries aged 19 to 64 work, volunteer, or participate in job training for 80 or more hours per month. The timing, though, was set by Congress in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025, not by the defendant, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, in its guidance on implementing the requirements, the judge said.

“There is a certain point at which damages fail to justify the issuance of such an extraordinary measure,” Stearns wrote later. “Plaintiffs have not shown that their damages rise above that minimal threshold here. Moreover, the additional costs that may be incurred by the States are unlikely to bloom disproportionately given the familiarity of the responsible state agencies with the tasks to be performed.”

Lawyers for the states and the government did not immediately return requests for comment.

In addition to the Jan. 1, 2027, deadline to implement changes, states in their motion for an injunction noted that under the guidance, they also must inform Medicaid recipients of the looming update in notices by Sept. 1.

The states also opposed the guidance on how to determine whether a person is medically frail, which would exempt them from the work requirements. The guidance suggests that in no case can states base their determinations of whether an individual is “medically frail” solely on their records that an individual has a “particular diagnosis or condition” and improperly limits the short-term hardship exception for individuals experiencing an emergency declared by the president to those who can establish that the emergency renders them unable to comply, state lawyers told the court.

Government lawyers said the One Big Beautiful Bill Act delegated the definition of medically frail to the federal government, and the states are seeking to impose “arbitrary limits” on that authority. They also said the state plaintiffs had not met the standards for a preliminary injunction.

Stearns said on July 30 that the court’s denial of the injunction request “is not a reflection or anticipation of its ultimate views on the merits of the underlying litigation,” which will proceed.

“As illustrated in the pleadings and briefings to date (and in the arguments of counsel during the hearing), this case presents difficult issues regarding the scope of Congress’s delegation of interpretative authority to the Secretary and the faithfulness to Congressional intent with which the Secretary performed his task,” the judge stated.

“This, in turn, requires an examination of the data relied upon by the Secretary and the judgments (some medical) that underlay his amplification of Congress’s legislative outline.

“These are determinations that, in the view of the court, should be made on a developed record of the kind that informs a court’s decision at the summary judgment stage of a case.”

Prices for electronic devices reliant on advanced memory chips, from smartphones to gaming consoles, have risen as the AI data-center buildout tightens supply and drives component costs higher. The resulting memory-chip crunch is now weighing on consumer demand, with Goldman’s latest note showing that the pressure is increasingly visible in China’s handheld-device market.

Goldman analyst Allen Chang, who focuses on everything from smartphones to semiconductors, AI, EVs, and robotaxis, cited new data on Friday showing that China’s smartphone shipments fell 17% from a year earlier and 36% from May, to 17 million units in June.

Second-quarter shipments totaled 69 million units, little changed from the previous quarter and a year earlier but above Goldman’s 59 million estimate. Chang expects full-year 2026 shipments to decline 10%.

June 5G shipments fell 12% year over year to 16 million units, representing 85% of the market.

“We expect 2026 shipments to decline at 10% YoY, given rising memory cost weighing on demand,” Chang wrote in the report.

Chang noted that the average number of cameras per handset declined to 2.9 this year, down from a 2022 peak of 3.8, while the share of cameras with resolutions of at least 20 megapixels increased to 66% of the total, up from 57% in 2025.

Model pricing for various foldable smartphone brands

Smartphone model launch pipeline

Professional subscribers can read more about the memory chip market, data center buildouts, and smartphones at our new Marketdesk.ai portal.

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

Abdul Malik al-Houthi, the leader of Yemen’s Ansar Allah, commonly known as the Houthis, said Thursday that there were indications Saudi Arabia was planning a major escalation in Yemen, as the war between the two sides has been reignited following the July 13 Saudi strikes on the Sanaa International Airport.

“We will work to establish the equation of siege with siege, especially since indicators reveal that the Saudis are heading toward comprehensive escalation, and we will seek God’s help against him and confront his comprehensive escalation with comprehensive escalation,” al-Houthi said, according to Yemen’s SABA news agency.

The Guardian also reported on Thursday, citing Yemeni sources, that Saudi Arabia was preparing for a major escalation against Ansar Allah by sea and possibly by launching a ground offensive in central Yemen.

Saudi Arabia is looking to launch a new Red Sea coalition to keep the Bab el-Mandeb Strait open, and the Saudi Defense Ministry announced that 14 countries backed the effort. The full coalition hasn’t been released, but according to Saudi officials, it includes—

• Kuwait
• Qatar
• Bahrain
• Pakistan
• Turkey
• Egypt
• Jordan

Ansar Allah imposed a blockade on Saudi ports following the Saudi strikes on the Sanaa airport, which were meant to prevent the landing of a plane that took off from Iran and was carrying members of a Yemeni delegation that attended the funeral of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Yemeni forces have also targeted oil infrastructure inside Saudi Arabia, and the Saudi military has launched additional strikes on Yemen of late.

Escalations against Ansar Allah are unlikely to achieve success since the group faced a brutal US-backed Saudi-UAE war from 2015 to 2022 and multiple US and Israeli bombing campaigns since then that failed to achieve their goals. President Trump has suggested that the US could restart bombing Yemen.

It seems that Saudi Arabia has forgotten how its army was defeated in Yemen. pic.twitter.com/jKEPPywSn9

— ابراهيم ناجي Ibrahim Naji (@Ibrahym22Nagi) July 31, 2026

Al-Houthi said in his comments on Thursday that the Yemeni people “are among the most suffering and targeted peoples by the Saudi regime within the framework of the American scheme, and in service of the Israeli enemy.”

The Department of Homeland Security has issued the broadest Jones Act waiver since at least the 1950s, just weeks after the US-Iran conflict erupted. The measure has allowed foreign-flagged vessels to transport fuel, crude oil, fertilizer, and other essential goods between US ports, bypassing domestic shipping restrictions to mitigate supply chain disruptions across various U.S. regions.

The Jones Act, a century-old law requiring goods transported between U.S. ports to be carried aboard U.S.-Built, US-owned, and US-crewed vessels, was immediately waived in the early days of the U.S.-Iran conflict by the Trump administration.

As of Friday, the waiver has entered its 135th day, suggesting that the administration is continuing to protect domestic supply chains and curb energy prices by temporarily easing maritime protectionist restrictions.

A recent Reuters report stated that the Trump administration was considering another extension of the waiver.

The Cato Institute’s Jones Act Waiver Tracker shows that nearly 50 million barrels have been moved since the waiver took effect on March 17.

The tracker indicates that the waiver sharply expanded domestic fuel movements, allowing foreign-flagged vessels to supply regions where limited U.S. shipping capacity, high transportation costs, and vessel shortages had constrained trade.

After 135 days, waiver shipments to the West Coast totaled 13.9 million barrels, equivalent to 108% of the region’s projected full-year baseline. Puerto Rico received 5.02 million barrels, equal to 134% of its normal annual pace, while New England’s 1.25 million barrels represented an increase of 215%. Gulf Coast shipments were 426% above the projected baseline, albeit from a much smaller historical base.

The data suggest the waiver is unlocking trade routes that were previously uneconomical or unavailable under Jones Act restrictions.

The largest effects are being seen in isolated or import-dependent markets, particularly the West Coast, Puerto Rico and New England, while the impact on the well-supplied Lower Atlantic remains marginal. Cargoes have included gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, renewable diesel, propane and ammonia.

Without the waiver, import-dependent markets such as those in California would likely have faced severe fuel shortages, with gasoline prices potentially surging well above $10 per gallon. The quick action by the Trump administration and the Energy Department appears to have mitigated supply disruptions in those regions where fuel shipments expanded the most.

Recall that suspending the Jones Act was one of six policy options identified by JPMorgan’s head of commodity research, Natasha Kaneva, for how the Trump administration could contain energy costs at the pump. The latest shipment data suggest that this option has played a material role in stabilizing vulnerable regional markets.

Authored by Chris MacIntosh via InternationalMan.com,

In 1997, historians William Strauss and Neil Howe published “The Fourth Turning,” a cyclical theory of Anglo-American history built around generational archetypes and recurring saecular rhythms of approximately 80 to 100 years — roughly the length of a long human life.

Their framework identified four “turnings,” each lasting roughly 20 to 25 years, that repeat in sequence.

The First Turning, the High, is an era of institutional confidence and community solidarity following a great crisis. The rules work, people trust them, conformity is rewarded — think the post-WWII boom, or the post-Civil War Reconstruction era.

The Second Turning, the Awakening, is a spiritual and cultural awakening that challenges the institutional consensus of the High. Individualism resurges; the establishment is questioned — the consciousness revolution of the 1960s-70s, the Second Great Awakening of the 1820s-30s.

The Third Turning, the Unraveling, sees institutions weaken, individualism reach its apex, and civic order decay. Trust collapses — in government, media, corporations, each other — as it did through the Culture Wars era of the 1980s-90s, or the Gilded Age of the 1870s-90s.

The Fourth Turning, the Crisis, is a decisive era of institutional destruction and reconstruction, typically catalysed by an existential threat — war, economic collapse, or civilisational rupture. The old order is swept away; a new one is forged. The Great Depression and WWII. The Civil War. The American Revolution.

“History is seasonal, and winter is coming.”

— William Strauss and Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning, 1997

The Current Position

By Strauss and Howe’s reckoning, the current Fourth Turning began around 2008 — the Global Financial Crisis being its catalytic spark — and will likely reach its resolution sometime in the 2025-2030 window. We are, in other words, in the heart of it. The battles being fought now — over monetary systems, institutional legitimacy, national sovereignty, and the nature of truth itself — are the defining conflicts of the crisis era.

What Fourth Turnings produce is not predictable in detail but consistent in structure: the old institutions are exposed as either corrupt or incompetent, a battle ensues between competing visions of the replacement order, and the outcome is determined by which faction can mobilise sufficient force — social, political, economic, or military — to impose its vision. The process is neither clean nor just. Fourth Turnings historically produce enormous suffering alongside the reconstruction.

The GFC was Act One: the revelation that the financial system was not a wealth-generation machine but a debt-recycling mechanism sustained by regulatory capture and central bank intervention. The quantitative easing programmes that followed — printing roughly $20 trillion across major central banks between 2008 and 2022 — bought time at the cost of massively inflating asset prices, concentrating wealth, and making the eventual reckoning worse.

Covid was Act Two: a simultaneous crisis of public health, institutional credibility, and civil liberties, weaponised by an apparatus of state control that had been building for decades and found in the pandemic a perfect justification for deployment at scale. More on this shortly.

Act Three is visible on the horizon: the currency crisis that follows years of money creation, the geopolitical realignment driven by a rising China and a fragmenting Western alliance, and the social rupture of populations that have been systematically lied to discovering the magnitude of the deception. Fourth Turnings do not end until the crisis is resolved. We have not arrived there yet.

*  *  *

If we are deep into a Fourth Turning, the years ahead could bring far greater economic, political, and social disruption than most people expect. Understanding the forces driving this shift may be essential to protecting both your wealth and your personal freedom. Our free special report, Clash of the Systems: Thoughts on Investing at a Unique Point in Time, reveals the trends now reshaping the world, the risks they create, and how a contrarian investor could position to stay one step ahead. Get instant access to Clash of the Systems.

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

The Curse It Is Cast…

“I have nothing to hide. I can explain and validate everything that I’ve done.”

– Dr. Anthony Fauci, recorded for TV in 2022

However you cut this Fauci business, one thing Americans have learned is how slippery and treacherous this thing called The Law has become.

You saw it in the sundry Trump prosecutions of 2024, too – a marvelous demonstration of how to play Hide-the-Salami with the truth about anything and everything.

You saw it in the structured failure to adjudicate election fraud in 2020.

You saw it in the Jan-6 prosecutions and the Congressional Jan-6 Committee charade that followed.

And much more.

And one thing it’s good for is demoralizing the whole citizenry to the max. Who in this land was not mortally depressed watching Rand Paul’s Senate hearing Wednesday starring Dr. Fauci? (One last time, the center of attention!) We have become a procedural republic, slipping into an impotence of legalistic self-fuckery the way old folks slip into dementia, one lost memory at a time. There sits the murderer of millions cloaked in the banality of his evil — as it was at Nuremburg eighty years ago — and this time, you just have to lump it, America. The law can’t touch him at all.

Dr. Fauci ran his own titanically corrupt fiefdom out of the nation’s public health complex. Half-a-million a year wasn’t enough for — let’s call him what he was — an executive bureaucrat. He doled out millions in grants to universities, drug companies, and putative public service orgs, and extracted his vig, about a million bucks in prize money during the Covid-19 episode, not counting his share of royalties from drug patents. A modest million. He must have thought: who will even notice. . . who would ever be bothered by that tiny number when Congress, the Federal Reserve, and everybody else is drowning in numbers with so many zeros it gives them tachycardia just to glance at the balance sheet.

Plus, the thoroughly dishonorable news media was busy making Dr. Fauci a rock-star. He had everything but the stadiums. The grand old gals of Hollywood were going all moist over him. “Julia Roberts sent me flowers today,” he typed into his government-issue diary. Barbra Streisand called him on the phone. “I told her that I work listening to her songs on ALEXA,” He gushed. His work resulted in the deaths of millions and the injury of millions more. Neverminding that, he carefully tracked and marveled at his burgeoning fame:

“Big front-page article abut [sic] me appeared in the Washington Post, [Dr. Fauci wrote]. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyoperbole [sic] to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson [sic] in the world.”

Did Dr. Fauci know that his work-product, the Covid-19 episode and the operations around it, were aimed at setting up conditions to get President Trump bum-rushed out of office in favor of the vacant and pliable tool that was “Joe Biden?” Did others on the White House Covid Task Force know how that would work? Did they know who or what they were in league with?

Anyway, it didn’t turn out as well as they’d planned, of course. The four years of “Joe Biden” only proved how much that coalition of Deep Staters, globalists, and domestic riffraff hated the old American republic and its pain-in-the-ass Constitution. But when they foundered in 2024 — when old Joe-from-Scranton finally gave away the game on that fatal debate stage — and the party had to stuff his idiot veep into the nomination, the Democratic Party crossed an event horizon into total detachment from reality, where they remain to this day.

So then, where did the Democratic Party get the idea that going balls-out Bolshevik-Jacobin would be their salvation after what they already did to try to wreck our country? And by Bolshevik-Jacobin I mean the marriage of murderous envy with civic psychosis. The line it is drawn; the curse it is cast, Dylan prophesied half a century ago. They’re in your face now. Just listen to them. They mean it. They want all your stuff and they want you dead. They want to put your sons in a cocktail dress. They want mutts from savage lands slavering on your daughters in a drainage ditch. Will half the people in this country really vote for that again?

Yet great forces unseen just now are driving the nation to an autumn reckoning, and the main thing to be reckoned is the survival of the USA as a functioning republic with the credibility of law restored and the demons of lawfare crushed. The possibility of legislated election reform slips away day by day, it’s true. But, please understand, this president will not allow the coming election to get pounded down a rathole. If nothing else, we are going to get an intervention under a national security executive order, on the president’s constitutional duty (and his oath) to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

The ensuing fight over this will be short and decisive. These mad dogs will be put down, as mad dogs must be. We are going to take our country back. Depend on it.