Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

Britain’s immigration system has hit a new low. A convicted Islamist terrorist who helped plot a bombing at the London Stock Exchange remains free to live in the UK, protected by human rights laws despite his asylum application being thrown out years ago.

The case of Shah Rahman exposes exactly how foreign terror offenders exploit loopholes that put British citizens at risk while officials tie themselves in knots over “rights.” As the migrant crisis spirals and taxpayers foot the bill for endless monitoring, this is not justice – it’s institutional surrender.

Rahman was jailed in 2012 alongside three other extremists inspired by Al-Qaeda over the plot to plant an improvised explosive device. He was released onto Britain’s streets just five years later in 2017, only to be recalled to prison in 2022 for breaches of his licence conditions.

This guy plotted to blow up the London Stock Exchange, went to prison twice and married a woman who was banned from Britain for life for having ISIS material, yet he gets to stay in the country because it would ‘violate his rights’ to deport him. https://t.co/MlKnUBupjs

— m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) April 21, 2026

After his initial release he lodged an asylum claim. It was rejected under Article 51 of the Refugee Convention, which bars refugee status for those convicted of “war crimes, crimes against humanity, terrorist acts or other serious criminal offences.”

Yet despite that rejection, an immigration judge ruled he could not be deported to Bangladesh. The judgement stated: “He was granted restricted leave to remain in the United Kingdom on the basis that he could not be removed to Bangladesh without breach of his rights under Article 3 of the Human Rights Convention.”

Article 3 guarantees the absolute right to be free from torture, inhuman or degrading treatment. In practice, it has become a get-out-of-deportation-free card for some of the most dangerous individuals on British soil.

Details of Rahman’s continued presence emerged during a separate legal battle involving his wife, Mauritian national Parveen Purbhoo. The pair married in an Islamic ceremony at East London Mosque in 2019 while he was on licence. Purbhoo was later barred from Britain for life by then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman after officers at Heathrow discovered Isis-related material on her phone.

A recent judgement in her case confirmed Rahman’s situation and delivered a damning assessment of her own conduct: “The applicant was complicit in Mr Rahman’s unlawful breach of notification requirements; and she has not provided either the police or SIAC with an explanation of how Islamist material came to be on her phone. Her willingness to place her own interests over and above legal or administrative processes is troubling and risky.” The court found she had been “reasonably assessed as a national security risk” and upheld the ban.

This is the same pattern of weakness we have highlighted before. In February we reported how the UK released another dangerous bomb-plot terrorist from prison early.

And back in January we covered the case of a convicted terrorist who plotted to bomb the British consulate now standing for election in the UK. Time after time, the system chooses leniency over public safety.

While ordinary Brits face rising costs, crime and the constant threat of terror, the state bends over backwards to accommodate those who plotted mass murder on our streets. Rahman’s case is not an outlier – it is the direct result of open-borders policies, ECHR activism and a political class more worried about international lawyers than British security.

Successive governments have talked tough on migration. Yet here we are in 2026 with an Islamist terrorist who targeted the London Stock Exchange still here, his wife’s Isis links exposed, and human rights lawyers still calling the shots. The Home Office insists it takes national security seriously. The evidence suggests otherwise.

Britain does not owe protected status to those who plotted to kill its citizens. Deportation should not be optional when the threat is this clear.

File this latest farce alongside a growing litany of ridiculous reasons sex criminals and other offenders have dodged deportation under the same broken system.

Albanian migrant Klevis Disha, who entered the UK illegally in 2001 under a false name and was later convicted for possessing £250,000 in dirty money, successfully fought deportation by claiming it would be unduly harsh on his 11-year-old British son – who apparently dislikes “foreign” chicken nuggets because of texture issues. 

First-tier Tribunal Judge Linda Veloso accepted the Article 8 family-life argument. Reform UK’s Shadow Home Secretary Zia Yusuf said: “A criminal migrant who entered Britain illegally under a false name and lied in a failed asylum claim has successfully fought his deportation by arguing his son disliked foreign chicken nuggets. This is the country the Tories and Labour have created.”

A Somali criminal, schizophrenic and alcohol-dependent for nearly 20 years, was allowed to stay because deportation would cause him excessive “stress” and breach Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights by worsening his mental health. Deputy Upper Tribunal Judge Ian Jarvis ruled: “I conclude that the weight of the evidence before the Tribunal indicates that the [man] will very quickly become noncompliant with his medication… without the 24/7 support and monitoring which he currently receives in the United Kingdom.”

An insane Pakistani paedophile who reoffended by assaulting a teenage girl after release from prison for sex offences escaped deportation because his “uncontrollable” alcoholism would allegedly lead to “inhuman or degrading treatment” in Pakistan without proper treatment. He remains in Britain.

A separate Pakistani migrant arrived on a spousal visa and was convicted of attempting to cause children under 16 to engage in sexual acts after grooming decoy “barely pubescent girls” online while his wife was hospitalised with Covid. He won his appeal because deportation would be “unduly harsh” on his British children and family life.

Migrant shambles as unnamed judge lets paedophile we cannot name (to protect HIS privacy) stay in UK because pervert’s Pakistani family might disapprove of him lusting after ‘barely pubescent girls’ https://t.co/4by6HxEcZ6

— Daily Mail (@DailyMail) February 7, 2025

The judge even factored in the wife’s lack of intimate relations during her illness. Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick called the case “disgraceful,” adding: “The public are right to think that our immigration system is rigged in the interests of people who mean us harm, illegal migrants, against the interests of the British public.”

And as the Daily Mail also revealed, another migrant won asylum by claiming he was gay and fleeing persecution – only to be exposed with a secret wife and child back in Cameroon. 

Revealed: Migrant granted asylum in Britain after claiming he was gay has a secret wife and child in Cameroon https://t.co/TMiC6wcoUI

— Daily Mail (@DailyMail) March 22, 2026

Even being a convicted pedophile as well as an illegal migrant isn’t enough to warrant deportation:

The pattern is undeniable. Activist judges, human rights laws that handcuff the Home Office, and a political class addicted to open borders keep handing victories to those who should never have been here in the first place. 

Britain’s children and communities deserve better. The safety of the public must come first – not endless excuses for foreign criminals.

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For a growing share of Americans, retirement no longer starts at 65.

This map, via Visual Capitalist’s Gabriel Cohen, shows where people aged 65 and older are still working across U.S. states, based on 2024 data from the U.S. Census Bureau via FinanceBuzz.

About 22% of Americans 65+ remain in the workforce, but the share climbs to nearly one-third in some states. The gap highlights how cost of living, job availability, and shifting retirement systems are reshaping when—and whether—Americans stop working.

The Workforces With The Most Seniors

The New England states of Vermont and New Hampshire (both 28.6%) lead the country in the number of seniors still working, followed by South Dakota at 27.6%.

A clear regional pattern emerges: Northeastern states dominate the top ranks, with many posting rates above 26%. Higher living costs and longer life expectancy likely contribute to more Americans 65+ staying in the workforce.

Most people are not working full-time, however. In fact, among its retirement-age workers, Vermont has the highest concentration of part-time employees nationwide, reflecting in part the social role work plays in many older Americans’ lives.

The Two Full-Time States

On the flip side, there’s Maryland, which has the highest share of full-time retirement-age workers in the country.

Maryland and Hawaii are actually the only two states in which a majority of working people aged 65 and up are employed full-time. Full-time work is generally essential for seniors who cannot rely on other retirement sources of income, such as Social Security, or who obtain needed benefits through their job.

The decline of traditional pensions is a key driver behind this shift. With retirement savings increasingly tied to 401(k) plans and market performance, many Americans are working longer to maintain financial security.

West Virginia and the Truly Retired

Among the 50 states in the country, West Virginia (16.7%) has the lowest share of retirement-age workers. It’s followed by Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, and Oregon, all of which sit around 19%.

In lower-ranking states like West Virginia and Arkansas, fewer Americans 65+ remain in the workforce—likely reflecting a mix of fewer job opportunities and lower living costs. In these areas, retirement may still be more attainable than continuing to work.

They may also have differing lifestyle preferences, electing to devote more time to family commitments than to the structure or social component of a job or so-called “side hustle.”

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out Mapping Unemployment Claims per 100,000 Workers on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist.

Authored by David Randall via RealClearScience,

The latest report from David Reich’s genetics lab at Harvard is that “Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia.” In other words, humans have been continuing to evolve in Europe and the Middle East for the last 10,000 years, with significant effect. Reich’s paper broadly substantiates the thesis of Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. Civilization hasn’t ended biological evolution, but proceeds alongside it. 

Reich’s genome-wide association study (GWAS) indicates that West Eurasians have increased or reduced their vulnerability to a variety of ailments. Genetic changes have rendered them less susceptible to leprosy, rheumatoid arthritis, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, and moreso to coeliac disease and gout. At the same time, there has been positive selection for fair skin, red hair, and intelligence, and negative selection for male-pattern baldness. In summary, West Eurasians have grown foxier, as the arc of their genetic history bends toward fluffy ginger genius. 

Reich’s conclusions are pretty likely to hold water. Too many scientific and social scientific fields have been affected by the irreproducibility crisis of modern science. The worst-hit disciplines use far too loose a definition of statistical significance, p < 0.05. Genome-wide association studies, by contrast, tend to use the extraordinarily tighter standard of p < 5 × 10^ −8. Reich lab’s research includes a variety of different standards of statistical significance, including some that are only of p < 8.9 × 10^ −5. That standard is orders of magnitude more reliable than most research. 

The data Reich’s lab can work with, after all, is remarkably bounteous. As the researchers wrote:

[W]e increased power through a 14-fold increase in sample size, driven by 10,016 ancient individuals for whom we report new data, which combined with previously reported data yields a dataset of 15,836 people spanning 18,000 years … The final dataset included 8,074,573 SNPs [single-nucleotide polymorphisms] and 1,665,051 insertions or deletions (indels) on chromosomes 1–22. 

Science only can advance on sure foundations when you’re reasonably likely the research will hold up. Sociology, psychology, any discipline where you cannot work with millions of pieces of data, cannot be expected to match GWAS levels of rigorous statistical significance. But, as many scientists have proposed, p < 0.01 or p < 0.005 are not impossible goals, even for disciplines less rich in data. Reich’s peers in other disciplines should look at his work and consider the benefits of reasonable certainty that a paper you publish actually says something true. 

Americans in general might also take Reich’s work as a prompt to reconsider our various moratoria on using American Indian biological data to provide gene samples. Reich’s report on West Eurasian genetic data presumably is only a beginning. We may expect reports to come on East Eurasians, Sub-Saharan Africans, Aboriginal Australians, Khoisan in South African, American Indians in Latin America—reports on people all over the world.

Except on the American Indians of the United States.

Our legal, regulatory, and cultural inhibitions mean that there will be an enduring blank spot in the knowledge we gain from the genetics revolution—knowledge which will aid not only paleogenetic research but also advances in medicine tailored to each individual’s DNA. American Indians might be the last people on Earth to benefit from such advances in genetically individuated medicine if we continue to veto researchers’ use of American Indian genetic and paleogenetic data. 

Science funders also should note that science proceeds by joint work in many disciplines and isn’t just a high-tech plaything. The Reich lab’s research depended not least upon “10,016 ancient individuals for whom we report new data.” Those individuals didn’t just show up in laboratories by magic. They came there by careful work by archaeologists, by intelligent observations from interested amateurs, by hard and careful work in caves, in ancient graves, and in sudden gullies opened by rainstorms. Brawn, physical finesse, and something of the Indiana Jones spirit of adventure were as important for making this research possible as microscopes and microchips. Dear Mr. and Mrs. Moneybags: no dig, no data. We all should remember that, too. 

David Randall is the Director of Research at the National Association of Scholars.

The United States has reduced intelligence sharing with South Korea pertaining to eavesdropping on North Korea following an alleged leak tied to sensitive information, according to local media reports.

But it is a major allegation that the government has dismissed as ‘absurd’. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung took to X at the start of this week to write, “Any claim or action based on the premise that Minister Chung ‘leaked classified information provided by the US’ is wrong.”

Bloomberg, citing Yonhap and others, wrote that “South Korean media reported that the US is limiting intelligence sharing on North Korea with Seoul after Unification Minister Chung Dong-young publicly identified North Korea’s uranium enrichment facility in Kusong last month.”

Washington reportedly began limiting access earlier this month to certain intelligence linked to North Korea’s technological capabilities, widely believed to involve aspects of its nuclear program, according to Yonhap News.

“It’s true that the US side has been restricting sharing parts of North Korean intelligence collected through satellites from early this month,” a senior military official said. “(The restricted sharing of intelligence) is related to information regarding parts of North Korea’s technology.”

Some 28,500 US troops are permanently stationed in South Korea, and the US is a longtime military partner going back to the Korean War of the mid-20th century. US intel-sharing has always heavily assisted Seoul with missile warning data and satellite surveillance.

The whole rare episode stems from remarks by South Korea’s Unification Minister Chung Dong-young during a March 6 parliamentary session, when he openly identified Kusong as a third North Korean uranium enrichment site alongside facilities at Yongbyon and Kangson.

The speech marked a first official acknowledgment by Seoul of the Kusong site, which then triggered backlash from Washington, featuring complaints from US officials through diplomatic and military channels who viewed it as a potential exposure of sensitive, possibly shared intelligence.

Chung in turn rejected the accusations, framing his remarks as all based in open source and public data which can be found through research reports.

Pyongyang is probably enjoying the spectacle, having long vehemently denounced the US presence on the Korean peninsula, also given the sporadic docking of a US nuclear submarine. This is a very rare moment of tensions among allies on the Korean peninsula. 

Via Decrypt.co,

• Coinbase launched crypto-backed USDC lending for U.K. users on Monday.

• Bitcoin holders can borrow up to $5 million in USDC, with Ethereum-backed loans capped at $1 million.

• The service uses Morpho, an open-source lending protocol on Ethereum layer-2 network, Base.

Crypto exchange Coinbase has expanded its lending service, now allowing U.K. customers to borrow USDC stablecoins using their Bitcoin or Ethereum holdings as collateral.

The service operates through Morpho, an open-source lending protocol on Base—the Coinbase-backed Ethereum layer-2 network—that powers Coinbase’s crypto-backed loans.

U.K. users can pledge cryptocurrency as collateral to access USDC liquidity without liquidating their digital assets.

Borrowing limits vary by collateral type.

Bitcoin holders can access up to $5 million in USDC, while Ethereum-backed loans top out at $1 million, depending on the amount pledged.

Coinbase first launched the crypto-backed loan service in the United States in January 2025, and said it has facilitated $2.17 billion USDC in loan originations as of April 14.

The lending product adds to Coinbase’s growing U.K. service portfolio.

The exchange introduced decentralized exchange trading for U.K. users just last week, and previously launched savings accounts in November 2025.

These offerings followed Coinbase’s February 2025 FCA registration, which enabled the firm to expand regulated services in the market.

“Crypto-backed loans are part of Coinbase’s efforts to build the number one financial app in the U.K.,” said Coinbase U.K. CEO, in a statement.

“We want to be the best place for U.K. consumers to invest, manage and grow their money.”

Coinbase (COIN) shares on the Nasdaq are down about 1% on the day at a current price above $204, though they’re up nearly 17% over the last week amid broader crypto and stock market recoveries.

China’s imports of chipmaking equipment from Malaysia and Singapore rose sharply in 2025 to surpass those from the US, which sank to an eight-year low, an analysis by Nikkei Asia has found – even as American companies remain a vital source of advanced tools for the country.

While the Netherlands and Japan remain China’s primary foreign sources of critical semiconductor manufacturing machines by shipment origin, imports from the two Southeast Asian countries reached record levels: $5.7 billion for Singapore, up more than 17% year over year, and $3.4 billion for Malaysia, more than double the 2024 figure.

Direct imports from the US, meanwhile, declined more than 34% to about $2 billion, the lowest level since 2017, according to Chinese customs data. The decline was to be expected following President Trump’s return to the White House, as he sharply limited access of US semiconductors to China, although tensions began earlier. Since Trump’s first term and during the subsequent Biden administration, the US has raised tariffs and imposed fresh export controls aimed at slowing China’s advances in chipmaking technologies for defense, space and artificial intelligence applications.

Despite the decline, the Chinese market remained a critical revenue source for leading US chip equipment makers last year. Applied Materials, Lam Research and KLA all earned more than 30% of their total sales from China in fiscal 2025.

Charles Shi, a veteran semiconductor analyst with Needham & Co., told Nikkei Asia that the uptick in China’s imports from Southeast Asia is mainly due to the large number of U.S. chip equipment makers expanding manufacturing capacity in the region to better serve non-U.S. clients.

“Lam Research is building significant manufacturing capacity in Malaysia as they work to meet growing equipment demand beyond what their U.S. manufacturing capacity can serve,” Shi said. “Singapore has been a popular destination for [the] U.S. equipment industry to go overseas. For example, both Applied Materials and KLA have been manufacturing in Singapore.”

The three top U.S. chip tool makers generated nearly $19 billion in combined revenue from China in fiscal 2025, significantly exceeding figures implied by customs data based on where shipments originated from and underscoring the effectiveness of American vendors’ production diversification strategies. Nikkei Asia first reported their production shift toward Southeast Asia in early 2023.

For ASML of the Netherlands, China’s share of revenue came to 29.1% in 2025, while the figure for top Japanese chip tool maker Tokyo Electron was more than 40% for fiscal 2025.

Anticipating major chip wars, over the course of 2020 to 2025, China’s accumulated chip tool imports from Japan reached more than $42 billion, followed by the Netherlands’ $35 billion . Japan is home to many top chip equipment makers such as Tokyo Electron, Screen Semiconductor Solutions and Ebara, while the Netherlands has the world’s largest chip equipment maker, ASML, as well as key suppliers such as ASM, an atomic-level deposition tool specialist, and Besi, a maker of advanced chip packaging tools.

Meanwhile, China’s domestic chipmaking equipment makers are experiencing a once-in-a-generation surge in growth, driven by Beijing’s push to foster homegrown tools and reduce reliance on foreign technologies. Top suppliers all reported record revenue and profits for 2025, led by Naura, Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment Inc. China (AMEC), ACM Research and Piotech.

Naura, China’s answer to Applied Materials, has seen its revenue balloon from 6.05 billion yuan ($887 million) in 2020 to 27.14 billion yuan in the first three quarters of 2025. Revenue for AMEC skyrocketed more than 400% from 2020 to 2025. Piotech, a thin-film deposition chip tool specialist, has seen its revenue grow 13 times between 2020 and 2025.

Shi of Needham said China has made good progress in fostering local chip tool makers, but internal competition is intensifying. “While leading domestic equipment companies are still posting strong revenue growth, there are indications that their margin performance is deteriorating,” Shi said of Chinese chipmaking companies. “We believe intensifying domestic competition might have forced domestic equipment companies to ‘race to the bottom’ by undercutting each other’s prices.”

With China’s equipment suppliers becoming more competitive in recent years, US policymakers are seeking to further close loopholes in export rules. In April, bipartisan lawmakers introduced the MATCH Act, which calls on “multilateral allies” to coordinate more closely in aligning and tightening export restrictions across key segments of the chipmaking equipment industry. These measures would further target critical “chokepoint” components and machinery, as well as shipments to leading Chinese memory and logic chipmakers, including CXMT, YMTC, SMIC and Hua Hong.

“Chinese tool companies on the Entity List are unable to get access to U.S. parts, but there are many parts that Europe and Japan can backfill, and that’s the conundrum that we find ourselves in today,” Kevin Kurland, a former official at the U.S. Department of Commerce and current senior advisor at Beacon Global Strategies, told Nikkei Asia. “If controls don’t get aligned multilaterally with allies, U.S. controls can undercut American companies’ competitiveness while allowing Chinese companies to continue to function and operate – a lose-lose outcome.

Alex Rubin, a former CIA China analyst and visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, told Nikkei Asia that “component export controls definitely make sense.”

“It’s very similar to what we are seeing in commercial aviation: China is assembling the finished C919 aircraft, but is sourcing parts from U.S. and European suppliers. Chinese companies are trying to compete with Boeing and Airbus, while sourcing from a similar supply chain,” Rubin said.

While China is still massively sourcing foreign chip tools, its ultimate goal is self sufficiency, industry sources say.

While durability, reliability and performance may not be at the same level, “for every foreign chipmaking tool, material and component you can think of, you could find Chinese versions,” said an executive with a Taiwanese chipmaking tool who participated in the Semicon China industry event in late March. “Chinese chipmakers will continue to buy foreign solutions while they can, but there’s no doubt about the country’s will to increase the use of homegrown suppliers.”

“China is adopting a two-way approach: developing homegrown tools while continuing to purchase foreign equipment whenever possible. Since imported tools often offer better performance, they are still buying aggressively — and even repurposing consumable parts from one piece of equipment to repair other chipmaking machines,” another chip industry executive with knowledge of the matter told Nikkei Asia.

A third executive with a Chinese chipmaking tool supplier told Nikkei Asia that the aggressive expansion plans by Chinese logic and memory chipmakers have given local vendors more opportunities to break into and secure a position in the domestic supply chain.

Nikkei Asia was the first to report that Chinese top chipmakers led by SMIC, Hua Hong and Huawei-linked chipmakers are aiming to aggressively expand advanced chip production capacity, including on the performance level of 7-nanometer or even 5-nm technologies, to support the rise of domestic AI chip developers. Meanwhile, top Chinese memory chip producers CXMT and YMTC are launching their largest expansions in response to the unprecedented global memory crunch amid the AI boom, Nikkei revealed in early February.

American allies such as the Netherlands and Japan have already introduced rules to align with U.S. export controls, but policymakers in Washington feel those restrictions are still much too loose. The U.S. has imposed multiple rounds of regulation on exports to China and has added many leading Chinese chip equipment suppliers and chipmakers to its Entity List.

The MATCH Act, if passed, could further limit global vendors’ ability to supply critical tech to China. The bill targets some older – though still critical – generations of chipmaking machines as well as components, both of which can be chokepoints for China’s efforts to build up its domestic chip industry. Introduced in early April, the bill still needs to go through the legislative process, and it remains unclear how the Netherlands, Japan and other countries would respond to any diplomatic pressure to comply. For example, only ASML in the Netherlands and Canon and Nikon in Japan can produce commercially viable lithography machines — an area where China continues to face significant challenges.