[FOX] The Trump administration is intensifying its efforts to target foreign nationals accused of defrauding the U.S. government, as the FBI and other federal agencies pursue suspects operating from overseas.
Last week, the FBI released a "Most Wanted" list highlighting alleged fraud suspects as the administration continues its broader crackdown on fraud. Officials say the involvement of foreign nationals in multiple schemes has heightened concerns about overseas actors exploiting U.S. government programs.
Among those named is Onur Simsek, a Turkish national whom the FBI believes is living in Turkey. Prosecutors accuse Simsek of leading a defense procurement fraud scheme that secured U.S. military contracts by falsely certifying Turkish-made parts as tested and qualified, potentially rendering critical military equipment inoperable.
Federal authorities allege Simsek is one of a number of foreign nationals who have infiltrated and exploited U.S. federal funds to obtain taxpayer funds.
In a statement, General Services Administration Administrator Ed Forst pointed to Simsek's alleged conduct while discussing the administration's efforts to combat fraud.
"Simsek's alleged procurement fraud deprived taxpayers of value, denied honest businesses fair opportunity, and diverted critical resources from American warfighters," Forst said. "Under President Trump and Vice President Vance, GSA will continue working relentlessly to identify and hold accountable those who try to cheat the federal marketplace and steal from the American people."
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited
[Regnum] Due to El Niño, the Pacific Ocean surface water temperature anomaly will approach 200-year record levels. Vladimir Klimenko, a climate scientist, Doctor of Engineering Sciences, professor at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, and Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, spoke with Regnum News Agency.
The Pacific Ocean's behavior is divided into three phases, the climatologist noted. The warm period is called El Niño and is accompanied by a rise in ocean surface water temperatures. In 2026, this phenomenon will approach record levels.
"The current El Niño will be one of the strongest in the last 200 years, and perhaps the strongest ever. The most understandable parameter of El Niño behavior is the surface water temperature anomaly. It currently stands at 1.79 degrees. The world record is 2.7," Klimenko explained.
El Niño hasn't yet peaked in 2026. It typically occurs between October and February. According to the climatologist, the natural phenomenon will reach its peak in November—it's still unclear whether temperatures will warm up by one degree to break the record.
"In any case, it will be somewhere near the record. El Niño lasts for about a year—from May to June of the following year. Then there are two options: the phenomenon immediately transitions to a cold phase called La Niño, or the system often transitions to a neutral state," Klimenko noted.
The scientist emphasized that processes occurring in the Pacific Ocean have the greatest impact on North and South America, Southeast Asia, Australia, and South Africa. Neither El Niño nor La Niño have any impact on the climate of virtually all of Russia.
"During a warm period, like now, oddly enough, the extreme eastern borders of our country—Chukotka, Kamchatka, and Primorsky Krai—get colder. But not every season and not very severely. It has no effect on the European part of Russia at all," Klimenko concluded.
Earlier, Andrey Kiselev, a climatologist at the Voeikov Main Geophysical Observatory, noted that after a cold winter, Russia would experience an abnormally hot period. According to the scientist, any season could be warm, including summer or fall.
In July, Alvaro Silva, a scientist with the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO), warned of increased heat due to El Niño. He said the increased temperatures could lead to droughts in various parts of the world, particularly in the Caribbean and Latin America.
#2
This usually means heavy precipitation in the US southwest, a region in desperate need. But I am usually disappointed when climate scientists get really certain about a forecast.
#3
Worked on two bridges in SD River during serious El Nino seasons. Nothing to sneer at - water levels 10'+ at peaks. Back country is all granite, fractured and decomposed, which holds water months after rain stops
Posted by: Frank G ||
09/12/2026 18:44 Comments ||
Top||
#4
For once, those Russkies aren’t exaggerating. Heavy winter rain in normally desert Australian interior, drought in normally wet southwest, eastern interior. Blocking highs (record atmospheric pressure) to the South, directing coastal showers onto my roof in North Coast NSW.
For the most data dense weather forecasting for Benighted Australia, Cyclones Oz on UTube. Awesome.
[BB] The Trump administration announced on Friday that Africell, the only American-owned telecommunications company in Africa, will receive a $99.6 million loan from the Export-Import Bank (EXIM) to help it compete with Chinese telecom giant Huawei.
The loan from EXIM was intended to “boost the telecommunications sector in Angola and strengthen American technology leadership abroad” by helping Africell acquire the latest American and European mobile phone technology.
“Africell’s fast growth in Angola and DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo), and our long-term market leadership in Sierra Leone and The Gambia demonstrate the unique benefits that high-class American technology, skills and investment can bring to Africa,” said Africell CEO Ziad Dalloul.
“We are pleased to be working with EXIM to introduce more trusted communications infrastructure to our operating markets,” he said. “In doing so, we are flying the flag for American technology leadership and creating secure pathways for future American and allied digital technologies to be deployed in sub-Saharan Africa, including in the Lobito Corridor region.”
“The quality and results achieved through partnerships with the United States and American companies speak for themselves. This is a win for both our countries: American technology and a more prosperous, more connected Angola,” said Shannon Nagy Cazeau, charge d’affaires of the U.S. Embassy to Angola and Sao Tome and Principe.
While these statements did not directly mention China, Reuters noted on Friday that the Trump administration has been working on a “clean network” initiative to get security-threatening Chinese telecom and network equipment out of the U.S. and allied nations, particularly equipment from Huawei.
The U.S. government has slapped Huawei with heavy sanctions for allegedly spying on users, a charge the company denies, even though Chinese law explicitly requires all companies to hand over information about their customers upon demand from Chinese Communist intelligence services. Huawei has also been implicated in Communist China’s human rights abuses, such as the surveillance and oppression of the Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang province.
Huawei currently has about 52% of the 5G mobile data market in Africa, a grip the Trump administration seeks to loosen. Africell, a company that started up in 2001 with a data center in Angola, received a $100 million loan in 2018 from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which has since been renamed to the International Development Finance Corporation (DFC). Africell used the funds to expand into the DRC, Gambia, and Sierra Leone. Africell repaid the loan three years ahead of schedule.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited
[Regnum] American companies are working to create a multi-layered emergency defense system against runaway artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. This was reported on September 10 by Axios.
"Several anthropological researchers have warned that rogue versions of AI, acting outside of human control or pursuing goals not intended by humans, could ultimately destroy humanity," the author of the publication clarified.
Companies are trying to create fully autonomous shutdown procedures in the event of serious problems, if the behavior of AI agents appears dangerous to an observer.
"Kill switches" may become a last line of defense with more advanced AI systems, but researchers are unsure about the ability of humans to stop a system designed to bypass such switches.
Earlier, scientist Geoffrey Hinton stated that governments should ban the development of super-powerful AI systems. He believes such developments could have catastrophic consequences for the planet's population.
President Vladimir Putin emphasized that Russia understands not only the potential of AI implementation but also the potential threats. In this regard, the Russian leader ordered the assessment and prevention of risks associated with the widespread implementation of AI.
[BB] January AI cofounder and CEO Noosheen Hashemi, one of Oracle’s first vice presidents — who helped increase the company’s annual revenue from $26 million to $3 billion — a former Silicon Valley Democrat who became a supporter of President Donald Trump and his America First agenda, told Breitbart News that Chinese AI models do not enter American systems as neutral technology. “To the extent that we implement Chinese models in our work, those vessels don’t travel empty,” she said, noting there is now “empirical evidence” that AI systems can affect “what the user remembers” and “what the user receives as information.”
Hashemi pointed to four mechanisms she said are reflected in empirical research — “data, rules, filters, and language” — through which AI outputs can be shaped. She described data as “what the model learns from the training material and information environment” and said a 2026 Nature paper found Chinese state-scripted coordinated media in large-language-model training data. According to Hashemi, when researchers deliberately subjected an open-weight model to additional pretraining on that material, “its answers became more favorable to Chinese political institutions and leaders,” which she said demonstrates that “the data that goes in essentially impacts the answers that come out.”
The second mechanism, Hashemi said, involves the “rules” developers operate under, including “legal requirements, post-training instructions, refusal policies, and behavioral goals.” She pointed to another 2026 paper from Stanford and Princeton published in PNAS Nexus that, as she described it, posed 146 questions about Chinese politics to models originating in China and models originating elsewhere. China-originating systems were “substantially more likely to refuse basically sensitive questions, or give shorter answers, or give inaccurate answers,” she said. Hashemi cited examples involving dissident Wei Jingsheng, the Great Firewall, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, saying one model inaccurately described Liu as “a Japanese scientist associated with nuclear weapons.” She said such responses can “sound like an authoritative correct answer, except it’s wrong.”
Hashemi said “filters” are controls applied before an answer reaches a user and can “block, shorten” or “rephrase material.” She described a 2026 DeepSeek audit in which researchers tested nearly 650 politically sensitive topics and found only 12 produced what she called “hard censorship,” such as an explicit error or empty response. She said researchers also found what she described as “semantic suppression,” in which a model still produced an answer but information was filtered. According to Hashemi, information could be present in the model’s reasoning before the final answer was revised or reframed around topics such as “transparency or government accountability or civic mobilization.”
Language can also change the response, Hashemi said, pointing again to research she said found “more favorable answers about Chinese political institutions and leaders if the questions were asked in Chinese rather than in English.” She also cited two studies from 2025 in which people were exposed to liberal-biased, conservative-biased, or neutral models. According to Hashemi, participants’ “opinions and decisions were affected by the model’s bias, even when their own views were counter to the model,” while another study involving almost 5,000 people found attitudes on policy areas changed based on how the model formulated the question. “The overall risk to changing history is sort of forward-looking,” she said, “but the evidence that AI can change and shape answers is very real.”
For ordinary users, Hashemi said identifying systematic foreign influence is difficult because AI often delivers a single synthesized response rather than a visible collection of sources. “A library used to give you 10 books, Google gave you 10 links, but AI more often than not is giving you one answer, and you can’t really see how it’s coming up with that answer,” she said. China, she said, “doesn’t have to really change the historical record” if AI becomes “that front door to the historical record,” because “shifting the answers enough” could influence what information users receive.
Hashemi urged users — including students — to practice what she called “AI literacy.” Students receiving an AI-generated answer “should look up the sources,” “open the links,” compare information, and avoid assuming that “the one answer that they’re getting is the answer,” she said. Hashemi pointed to differences among AI companies, noting that Anthropic has published Claude’s constitution while xAI has promoted “truth seeking.” “Consumers have choice,” she said, adding that the United States also has “private capital,” “entrepreneurs,” “transparency,” and a free press that can evaluate, test, and question models. “In a free society, no answer has to be final,” she added, warning against taking answers from AI “as gospel.”
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited by Andrey Bulkin
[Regnum] On September 9–10, 2026, in Dallas, Republicans held an event unlike any in modern American politics—the party's first national convention during the midterm elections. Essentially, it was a hybrid of a supporters' rally, a policy presentation, and a major fundraiser.
No candidates were nominated, no new party platform was approved—all the formal elements typical of traditional conventions were absent. Instead, over 100 speakers delivered speeches for 12 hours each day for two consecutive days, and US President Donald Trump appeared on stage both evenings, opening and closing the event.
The decision to hold the event wasn't made spontaneously. The Republican National Committee began laying the groundwork back in January. Trump himself announced the event in June via Truth Social, promising to host "a convention the likes of which has never been seen before."
By the time of the convention, the Republicans faced a number of issues that made its holding not just desirable, but necessary. However, not all of them were driven by the current agenda.
The fact is, the party whose representative occupies the White House almost always loses seats in Congress. The head of state himself acknowledged this in his speech: "It's a wonderful challenge—the fact that midterm elections shouldn't be won by the incumbent. We're going to change that."
There are several reasons why this happens, the first of which is psychological. Supporters of the winning side relax after a successful presidential race, while the losing side, on the contrary, mobilizes on a wave of anger over their defeat.
Nor should we dismiss inflated expectations. Any administration faces challenges in implementing its policies, and the solutions aren't always satisfactory to everyone who voted for the president and the party he represents. However, as the saying goes, only those who do nothing make no mistakes.
As one convention attendee told The Washington Times, "Midterm elections are always a tough time for any party; they're low-turnout elections."
Polls before the convention did indeed show a Democratic advantage in motivation. According to the University of Massachusetts, 42% of Democrats said they were "very enthusiastic" about voting, compared to 30% of Republicans. Reuters/Ipsos put the margin at 40% to 27%.
Trump's approval also fell, hovering around 33-38%, but despite this, he remained a leader capable of mobilizing the MAGA core of the Republican electorate.
Of course, the decline in ratings is also linked to the entirely objective difficulties the country has faced recently. Chief among these is the war with Iran.
The conflict, which began in February 2026, dragged on. Oil prices exceeded $100 per barrel, leading to higher gasoline prices and a general rise in the cost of living in the United States.
Against this challenging backdrop, a fierce battle has unfolded between the candidates of the two major parties. The most intense competition is taking place in Texas, Michigan, Maine, Ohio, Iowa, and Alaska. According to polls, the candidates in these states are currently close, requiring maximum voter mobilization.
The congress was conceived as a tool for solving all the mentioned problems at once.
Trump decided to use his own political capital to boost his party's electoral chances and reverse a persistent historical trend. In a comment to Politico, Republican strategist Mark Bednar noted, "We've seen many Trump voters willing to crawl over broken glass to vote for the president." These are precisely the voters the convention was designed to appeal to.
He needed to inextricably align all Republican candidates with the president's "America First" platform and mobilize those supporters of the president who typically skip the midterm elections. So he bluntly addressed the electorate: "Pretend I'm on the ballot."
Of course, there was some political cunning involved. "I ask you to let us finish the job we started—with the two best years in presidential history," the White House chief urged.
This puts voters in an interesting position: by voting against the Republicans, they will be forced to take at least some responsibility for the failures of the party and the administration, as well as for the problems they caused – after all, they were once again prevented from finishing what they started.
It's literally a political cliffhanger: want to see how this ends? Then let it be played out. Trump thus turns voting not into a choice between political platforms, but into a personal commitment for every potential supporter—either let him finish the final chapter, or betray him and then not complain about the consequences.
It was also important that the convention provided an opportunity to present candidates from swing states to a wider national audience. This was done both to secure additional votes and to attract new sponsors.
At the same time, a clear and easily understood enemy image was constructed around the Democrats, clearly visible to the average American. "In state after state, the Democratic establishment has been overthrown and replaced by crazed lunatics and radicals," Trump declared. Other convention participants echoed his sentiment, further confirming the unity of the party's and the White House's core policy positions.
The most high-profile, yet also most controversial, element of the convention was the promise to pay $5,000 to every American adult if the party retains control of both houses of Congress. "If the Republicans win, you win with us. And it's called the Trump Dividend. Congratulations. Now all we have to do is win," the US President promised.
The initiative's cost is estimated at over $1.3 trillion, which has, of course, drawn criticism. However, compared to the Biden administration's trillion-dollar spending on promoting a green and left-liberal agenda, as well as the expenditures on insane USAID projects and ineffective attempts to upgrade infrastructure, this isn't such a significant sum, especially since this time it will be spent on Americans, not on dubious projects.
The convention's final night delivered another important signal to the party. Vice President J.D. Vance, whose speech was widely seen as the unofficial kickoff to the 2028 presidential campaign, spoke more about family, faith, and "birthright" than Trump typically does.
The crowd chanted "J.D. 48!", hinting at a possible presidency and its ordinal number. Vance, in turn, responded, "We have to do what's necessary in November, and then we'll think about what's next."
The audience was impressed. "He looked like the right man today. After the midterms, they'll pass the baton to him, and he's ready," one viewer told the New York Post.
The congress may not have been a panacea for the party, but it served an important function: it provided a unified platform, a common message, and a central figure around which to rally the electoral base.
Trump, despite all his inherent contradictions and the liberal press's attempts to portray the convention as a desperate move or simply a festivity, acted as a political battering ram. He decided to carry the party along with him, using his ability to overcome voter indifference or discontent.
Whether this will work in the November 3rd elections remains to be seen, but it is already clear that Trump's ability to improvise is unmatched in American politics—and he will not limit himself to a set of standard tools.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
