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On a night that overall could be summed up as uninspiring, the Mets sputtered to a second straight loss, 8-4 at Nationals Park.

A crazed Texas woman gunned down a 21-year-old female she was living with, falsely claiming that it was her granddaughter -- and a day after she reportedly told police she was "seeing demons."

Knicks spark plus Josh Hart was back at it during Wednesday’s practice, taking numerous corner 3-pointers in the brief window open to the media.

Playing both ways in the same game for the first time in almost a month, Shohei Ohtani needed just one pitch to notch his latest bit of MLB history.

The US Is Still A Decade Away From Breaking China’s Rare Earth Hold

The U.S. is still at least a decade away from meaningfully reducing its dependence on China for the most critical rare earth minerals, despite billions of dollars in new investment and political pledges to move faster, according to a new report from Bloomberg.

While Washington has pushed to build domestic mining, refining, and manufacturing capacity, analysts say China is likely to retain its dominance over heavy rare earths—particularly dysprosium and terbium—until at least the mid-2030s. Those minerals are essential for the high-performance magnets used in fighter jets, submarines, missiles, electric vehicles, wind turbines, and other advanced technologies.

Forecasts from McKinsey & Company, CRU Group, and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence suggest producers outside China will meet less than 20% of global demand for dysprosium and terbium by 2035. The U.S. and its allies may make faster progress in reducing reliance on China for more abundant light rare earths, but the heavier materials remain far harder to replace.

The challenge is not simply digging more minerals out of the ground. Rare earth production involves mining ore, separating it into oxides, and then converting those materials into metals and magnets...a supply chain China dominates at nearly every step.

Heavy rare earths are especially difficult because they are less abundant and far more complex to refine. Producing ultra-pure material can require more than 1,000 chemical separation stages, and even small mistakes can affect magnet performance. Over decades, China built a deep advantage through refining infrastructure, technical expertise, and government-backed industrial policy. It also restricted exports of certain processing technologies, making it harder for competitors to catch up. The U.S., by comparison, has only a small pool of specialists with experience in rare earth separation and processing.

Bloomberg writes that Washington has begun investing heavily to rebuild domestic capacity, including Pentagon support for Lynas Rare Earths Ltd., currently the only commercial refiner of heavy rare earths outside China.

But production remains limited. Lynas produced just eight tons of dysprosium and terbium combined in the first quarter of 2026, while global demand is measured in thousands of tons each year. New projects in the United States, Australia, and Brazil could expand supply, but analysts still expect significant shortages in mining, refining, and magnet manufacturing by 2035.

China’s lower production costs have made the market even harder for rivals; past price swings wiped out many non-Chinese projects before they could scale. That leaves the U.S. facing a long and expensive effort to loosen China’s hold over a supply chain that has become increasingly important to both economic competitiveness and national security.

Tyler Durden Wed, 05/20/2026 - 21:20

Republicans blasted the Board of Parole members for voting to release child predators.

It was Bridges, dribbling across the court and delivering a stepback 3-pointer over Evan Mobley with the shot clock expiring to make it 97-93 with 2:38 remaining.

A Mexican sports journalist was carjacked at gunpoint while on live television on Tuesday.  Fernando Vargas was doing an interview live on “Bla, bla, bla deportivo” on Mexican sports station Activo Deportes from his car that was parked at a gas station when a man with a gun abruptly opened the driver’s side door, Awful...

Caitlin Clark was a late scratch on Wednesday night.

Who would have thought government was full of “bureaucratic barriers?” Not longtime politician Karen Bass. Asked this week why she’d failed to meet her own goal of ending the scourge of homelessness in her first term, she replied: “I didn’t anticipate some of the bureaucratic barriers that I would experience, but I am prepared to...

Charles Berry, 66, was taken into custody Monday in connection with the 1986 rape and murder of Roberta Walls, cops said.

New Fed Chair Pledges 'Regime Change' To Fight Inflation - Here's What That Could Mean In Practice

Authored by Kevin Stocklin via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Newly confirmed Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh, pledging new tactics to fight inflation, faces an uphill battle to keep rising prices in check.

At left is former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell; at right is newly confirmed Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh. Courtesy of the Federal Reserve; Hoover Institution

At his April 21 Senate confirmation hearing, Warsh called for “a regime change in the conduct of policy” at the Fed under former chair Jerome Powell, whose tenure saw annual inflation exceed 8 percent during the Biden administration and has failed since 2021 to keep inflation below its target.

“Once you let inflation take hold in the economy, it’s more expensive and harder to bring it down, and so the fatal policy error going back four or five years is still a legacy that we’re dealing with,” Warsh stated. “Hard-working Americans are no doubt feeling it.”

Americans are suffering as price increases outpace wages. And as of April, the inflation rate of 3.8 percent remains persistently above the 2 percent target set by the Federal Reserve.

What is the new Fed chair’s plan to get inflation under control? Analysts predict that he will bring a different approach, which will include reducing the Fed’s massive $6.8 trillion bond holdings, prioritizing interest-rate actions over quantitative easing, and focusing on the money supply over other metrics.

“Warsh is likely going to pursue a smaller Fed balance sheet and try to use this ‘tightening’ as a bargaining chip to get the Federal Open Market Committee to lower short-term rates,” Chris Whalen, investment banker and former Fed staffer, told The Epoch Times. “His comments on the disaster of quantitative easing are quite clear.”

The Legacy of Cheap Dollars

Except for a brief interlude during President Donald Trump’s first term, the Fed has pursued a cheap-money strategy since the mortgage crisis of 2008–09, keeping its benchmark short-term interest rate—the federal funds rate—near zero, and only raising rates in 2022 when inflation was approaching double digits. Simultaneously, the Fed pursued an experimental policy called quantitative easing (QE), in which it created money to buy bonds from money-center banks, flooding the U.S. economy with dollars.

Between 2008 and 2022, the Fed accumulated $8 trillion in new financial assets on its balance sheet, effectively transforming it into one of the world’s largest asset managers and the largest single owner of U.S. Treasuries. Warsh has been an outspoken critic of quantitative easing, leading many economists to predict he will try to reverse this policy and shrink the Fed’s balance sheet.

During his confirmation hearing, he stated that “the Fed has an interest rate tool and a balance sheet tool … The balance sheet tool disproportionately helps those with financial assets; the interest rate tool hits the entire economy.”

While QE and low interest rates boosted demand in the wake of the mortgage collapse and pandemic lockdowns, they also drove up asset prices—notably stocks, bonds, and houses—to the benefit of wealthier Americans. Simultaneously, living standards fell for many Americans, whose dollars have lost more than 20 percent of their value over the past five years.

“The primary driver of inflation is the Fed’s expansion of the money supply, which the new Fed chair Kevin Warsh has addressed numerous times,” Julia Cartwright, economist with the American Institute for Economic Research, told The Epoch Times.

Between 2020 and 2022, the Fed injected approximately $6.4 trillion in new money into the economy to finance COVID stimulus payments, she said, and about 29 percent of America’s entire money supply today has been created since January 2020.

“Compounding this, the Iran conflict has choked off the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting roughly 20 million barrels of oil per day and a fifth of global LNG trade, driving up energy, fertilizer, plastics, food, and virtually every input price across the economy,” Cartwright said.

Follow the Money Supply

While the Iran war and tariffs have driven up prices, Steve Hanke, professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University who served on President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, maintained that inflation is fundamentally a monetary phenomenon, a matter of too much money chasing too few goods.

“To put the inflation genie back in the bottle, the Fed must dump the post-Keynesian economic models it relies on and start paying attention to the quantity theory of money and the money supply, broadly measured,” Hanke told The Epoch Times.

“The Fed should announce that it is going to target the growth rate in the money supply that is consistent with hitting its two-percent-per-year inflation target,” he said. “Based on the quantity theory of money, that would require the rate of growth in M2 to be around 6 percent per year.”

The M2 measurement of the money supply includes cash, bank deposits, and funds that are readily convertible to cash, such as certificates of deposit and money market funds. During America’s low-inflation period, between 2008 and 2020, the annual growth rate in the money supply (M2) was 6.11 percent, Hanke said, and inflation, measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), averaged 1.77 percent.

Indeed, Warsh has indicated that he will focus on different metrics to measure and control inflation, beyond short-term price fluctuations.

“What I’m most interested in is: What is the underlying inflation rate—not what is the one-time change in prices because of a change in geopolitics or change in beef,” Warsh told senators at his confirmation hearing.

The Power of the Supply Side

What can the Trump administration do to help the Fed fight inflation? Economists call for supply-side initiatives, such as continuing deregulation, lowering tariffs, and boosting energy supply, as well as cutting government spending.

“Deficit financing pressures the Fed to expand the money supply and keeps interest rates higher than necessary,” Cartwright said.

She also advocated for a hands-off approach to private industry, despite the recent stakes the Trump administration has taken in companies like Intel.

“In a functioning economy, business compete primarily by bringing prices down—the more competition, the lower the prices and the better off consumers are,” Cartwright said. “The most persistent and under-appreciated source of higher prices is government interference in that competition through subsidies, preferential corporate deals, tariffs, and industrial policy that substitutes Washington’s judgment for the market’s.”

Lastly, economists say, politicians should let the Fed focus on fighting inflation rather than pressuring Fed officials to cut interest rates before inflation is tamed.

“The best course of action for the Trump administration to take would be to go radio silent on monetary policy,” Hanke said. “Do what President Reagan did with [then-Fed chair] Paul Volcker: Reagan gave Volcker the monetary policy reins and left him alone.”

Tyler Durden Wed, 05/20/2026 - 20:55

California's FAIR Plan is hiking homeowner insurance rates by nearly 30% in October, hitting hundreds of thousands of already struggling policyholders.

Spencer Pratt traded campaign speeches for barbecue smoke Wednesday, planting himself in South Los Angeles as the mayoral hopeful continued his push toward the finish line with another community-style campaign stop built around food, conversation and neighborhood concerns.

José Caballero should not lose the shortstop job he recently won. 

A rambunctious bovine reportedly bolted away from its owners in western Utica, leading authorities on a wild chase to capture it Tuesday.

A Manchester United veteran is closing in on a deal to join another soccer great in the MLS. 

Nothing is better than the comforts of home when you can get them, and the Liberty are looking to savor those as they begin a rare seven-game homestand in Brooklyn.  Starting with Thursday’s game against the Golden State Valkyries, the Liberty don’t travel again until June 8 to face the Connecticut Sun. To Jonquel Jones,...

The Knicks went back to old reliable. And it sparked their historic Game 1 comeback.

Texas Democrat Wants A Prison Camp for 'American Zionists'

A San Antonio Democrat running for Congress has proposed turning a federal immigration detention facility into an internment camp for "American Zionists,” and that is only the beginning of what she has been saying out loud. Maureen Galindo, a candidate in Texas' newly redrawn 35th Congressional District, faces a Democratic primary runoff next week against former Bexar County Public Information Officer Johnny Garcia. 

Maureen Galindo

With early voting running through Friday, May 22, she has managed to make national headlines for all the wrong reasons. In an Instagram post written in the third person, Galindo declared that she'll “turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking." The same post described the South San Antonio facility as "a castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists." The Karnes facility currently serves as an immigration detention center that the Trump administration has used to house migrants. 

This is not a one-off outburst. Galindo has built her campaign around the assertion that Garcia, her Democratic opponent, is a participant in a human trafficking conspiracy orchestrated by "billionaire Zionist Jews." She has vowed to put him "on trial" for treason. Her broader worldview is a litany of antisemitic tropes, including the claims that Jewish Zionists control Hollywood, the media, and local politicians.

"I think it's actually the Zionists who are putting Jewish people at the most risk," Galindo said last week, framing her remarks as ideological criticism rather than ethnic targeting. 

 Jewish community leaders in San Antonio are not buying the semantic wall she is trying to erect between her words and their plain meaning. 

The San Antonio Jewish Federation responded with a formal statement: "The JFSA strongly condemns the spread of antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories in public discourse."

The same statement added that "Divisive and hateful rhetoric targeting the Jewish community has no place in our civic life."

The Democratic Party's mainstream has begun, however belatedly, to distance itself from Galindo. John Lira, who lost to Galindo in the earlier primary, rescinded his endorsement last week. State Rep. James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Texas’s U.S. Senate race, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he refuses to share a campaign stage with Galindo even if she wins the runoff. "This antisemitic rhetoric has no place in our politics," Talarico said. "We need leadership in both parties willing to stand up and call out hate where it rears its ugly head." It is a fine statement. 

It would land with more force if Talarico's party were not increasingly accommodating to exactly this strain of politics, because Galindo is not an anomaly; she is a symptom. 

In Maine, the presumptive Democratic Senate nominee, Graham Platner, reportedly carried a Nazi totenkopf tattoo on his chest for years, even bragging about it, before covering it up once the campaign made such imagery inconvenient. Other progressive firebrands like Zohran Mamdani, Ilhan Omar, and Pramila Jayapal have all been criticized for antisemitic posturing. The party has also done nothing to distance itself from progressive commentator Hasan Piker, who is known for making antisemitic comments.

Galindo's campaign has become a national flashpoint precisely because her positions are expressed with unusual candor. 

While antisemitism continues creeping into the Democratic mainstream under the cover of euphemisms and activist jargon, Galindo skipped the dog whistles entirely and went straight for the megaphone.

She emerged from the primary narrowly ahead of Garcia. Now, the runoff election will test whether openly antisemitic rhetoric is finally disqualifying in modern Democratic politics, or whether the party’s activist base has already normalized something that would have ended a political career not long ago.

Tyler Durden Wed, 05/20/2026 - 20:30