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Congressman Outraged After Brief Detention By Gun-Wielding Israeli Settlers In West Bank Visit

Via The Cradle

A group of extremist Jewish settlers equipped with US-made M4 rifles detained US lawmaker Ro Khanna and his group during their visit this week to the southern occupied West Bank, the Democratic representative has disclosed.

"We were at a village that Israeli settlers had destroyed; they had destroyed the school, they had destroyed that village, and we were just looking at it," Khanna told Reuters on Thursday.  "And these hoodlums come in with machine guns – M4, an American-made machine gun – and they detain us. They block off the road." Khanna said, adding, "And then they call the IDF and ​the IDF is on their side, not on the side of the Americans."

via Reuters

Khanna's aide, Cameron Kasky, said the delegation was held for over an hour near Khirbet Zanuta, a Palestinian hamlet ethnically cleansed by Israeli settlers in 2023, before appealing to the US Embassy in Jerusalem to free them. 

Khanna's visit to the occupied West Bank comes as support for Israel splits Democrats ahead of the US midterm elections in November, with the issue contributing to primary defeats for incumbent lawmakers financed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Israel's favorability rating among Democratic voters has fallen from 59 percent in 2018 to 22 percent in May 2026, according to recent polls. 

The US lawmaker's confrontation with extremist settler groups occurs amid a broader campaign of state-supported settler violence that, by mid-2026, has escalated into systematic ethnic cleansing and land theft in the occupied West Bank. 

As of July 2026, illegal settler outposts effectively control 18 percent of the occupied West Bank, following an "unprecedented" expansion directly backed by the Israeli government.

Former Israeli officials have characterized the current escalation as a "systematic campaign" of "Jewish terrorism" intended to facilitate de facto annexation of the Palestinian territories.

An Oxfam analysis based on UN data revealed that since 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have killed at least 1,244 Palestinians, exceeding the total from the previous 17 years combined, and forcibly displaced nearly 46,000 people.

Israeli settlers, brandishing American made M4s, detained me & other Americans on my trip to Palestine.

When the IDF arrived, they sided with the settlers & continued our detention.

They made a huge mistake.

You will be hearing more soon. https://t.co/rZw8bRAn64 pic.twitter.com/4z50Ye4I7K

— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) July 11, 2026

Over 540 settler attacks were reported in the first quarter of 2026 alone, alongside a record 925 movement obstacles that restrict Palestinian life. 

Amnesty International concluded, based on independent investigations, that the Israeli government is implementing a policy of ethnic cleansing, supported by digital evidence, satellite imagery, and field investigations. 

* * *

More of Rep. Khanna's account of what happened...

Ro Khanna said he was detained by Israeli settlers armed with US-made rifles during a West Bank visit this week that the Democratic lawmaker cast as an unfiltered look at the toll of Israeli occupation as he weighs a 2028 presidential run https://t.co/1cLLaCQrOf pic.twitter.com/Dw8QqJNk0j

— Reuters (@Reuters) July 11, 2026 Tyler Durden Sat, 07/11/2026 - 21:00

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Guggenheim AI Survey Finds Adoption Surging Across Large IT Enterprises As Mass Layoff Fears Fall Flat

Building on Goldman's estimate that AI adoption across corporate America currently stands at roughly 20.6% and could rise to 24% by year-end, a Guggenheim Securities survey of 150 large-enterprise IT professionals found that 81% of respondents have already deployed AI agents. Anthropic and OpenAI are leading adoption among AI-native platforms, reinforcing the view that the enterprise chatbot and frontier-model battle is increasingly becoming a two-pony race.

The survey found that enterprise adoption of AI is quickly accelerating, with 81% of respondents already deploying chatbots.

About 42% of employees actively use AI for roughly 22% of the workday, resulting in an estimated 18% productivity gain.

According to respondents, AI accounts for an average of roughly 19% of corporate IT budgets, with spending concentrated in software development, data analytics, and IT operations. About half of respondents expect AI to become a separate budget line, while 37% of those firms plan to fund it in part through incremental spending beyond existing IT allocations.

The survey also provided more evidence of token cost concerns among respondents:

On average, respondents anticipate that AI will have a positive impact on their company's operating margin. Furthermore, respondents anticipate this impact to accelerate to 3.1% in 2027. We also note that our data indicates more respondents anticipate mid-to-high single- digit decreases in 2027 vs. 2026, which may be indicative of token costs outweighing realized benefits from AI adoption. With that being said, this is still significantly outweighed by an anticipated benefit from AI.

Recall the recent tokenmaxxing fiasco and the mysterious $500 million Claude bill, Uber capping AI coding spend after burning through its entire 2026 agentic budget in just four months, and UBS checks showing token costs have become a live issue for roughly 60% of enterprise customers. One company received its first AI invoice and heard leadership respond bluntly: "We don't have the money for this."

Related:

• 'Out Of The Magnificent 7, Into China': The AI Trade's Token Bill Is Finally Coming Due
• The Token Revolt Goes Mainstream: Palo Alto CEO Demands 90% AI Price Drop

On headcount, respondents reported an average 2.5% reduction tied to AI, far from the apocalyptic mass-layoff forecasts that dominated headlines earlier this year.

Marc Andreessen recently dismissed the narrative of sweeping AI-driven job cuts as "fake," and Guggenheim's findings lend some support to that view: AI is improving productivity and easing labor constraints, but it has yet to trigger mass layoffs.

Here are more AI adoption trends across the corporate world, offered in a recent note by Goldman analyst Sarah Dong... 

Read here.

However, JPMorgan takes a different view of the AI adoption trend. 

Tyler Durden Sat, 07/11/2026 - 20:25

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DARPA's Chilling Pre-COVID Blueprint: Predict, Manufacture, & Deploy Pandemics On Demand

Authored by Jon Fleetwood, via Substack,

A sprawling, multi-institution effort for "predicting" future pathogen characteristics, developing vaccines "in advance of need," and building the very systems intended to validate those predictions.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) spent the early 2010s constructing what may have been the most ambitious predictive vaccine-development infrastructure ever attempted: a sprawling, multi-institution effort designed to determine the future characteristics of purported pathogens before they emerged and ultimately use those predictions to develop drugs and vaccines before they were needed.

The program, known as PROPHECY—short for Pathogen Defeat—was announced in 2010 under Broad Agency Announcement DARPA-BAA-10-93 and was managed by DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office.

DARPA itself described the vaccine-centric purpose of the program unambiguously.

According to the agency: “The Prophecy (Pathogen Defeat) program will explore the evolution of viruses in the hopes of predicting viral mutations and ultimately developing drugs and vaccines in advance of need.”

The effort was not limited to coronaviruses, influenza, or any other single disease category.

DARPA repeatedly stated that the goal was understanding: “the natural evolution of any virus.”

The result was a massive architecture that brought together machine learning researchers, statisticians, bioinformaticians, computational biologists, laboratory scientists, surveillance specialists, universities, contractors, and national laboratories into a single “predictive” framework.

Yesterday, this website reported that DARPA’s PROPHECY program expanded into the laboratory of coronavirus researcher Ralph Baric years before the COVID-19 pandemic and nearly a decade before the DARPA/DEFUSE proposal documented all three defining structural features of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein prior to the outbreak.

DARPA Wanted to Turn Vaccine Development from Reactive to Predictive

DARPA openly believed that existing vaccine development operated backwards.

The agency described the modern pharmaceutical model as: “observational and reactive.”

PROPHECY was intended to replace that model with one that was: “predictive and preemptive.”

Rather than waiting for future purported disease threats to appear before beginning the process of characterization and countermeasure development, DARPA sought systems capable of determining the characteristics of future pathogen populations in advance.

Everything in PROPHECY flowed from that objective.

Building the Blueprint Before the Pathogen

DARPA’s ambitions extended far beyond outbreak forecasting.

The agency stated: “DARPA seeks to achieve the ability to successfully predict the natural evolution of any virus, via platforms and algorithms which are capable of monitoring rare advantageous viral events…”

The program sought systems capable of determining:

• future mutations,
• future reassortments,
• future genetic events,
• the order in which mutations would emerge,
• genotype-to-phenotype relationships,
• and ultimately the characteristics of future pathogen populations.

DARPA acknowledged: “there is at present no reliable capability to predict viral reassortment or mutations responsible for the emergence of new viral strains.”

Its proposed solution was: “An investigative platform to predict mutations and possibly reassortments in advance of their occurrence.”

The agency further explained that PROPHECY sought: “predictive algorithms of viral evolution that are informed and validated experimentally using high throughput biological platforms…” and: “the integration of a viral evolution platform with an algorithm that predicts mutations which confer an evolutionary advantage to the viral population.”

Among the formal requirements of the program was the ability to: “reproducibly predict the genomic, proteomic, and/or functional attributes of the final viral population.”

DARPA also sought to determine: “the rate and order of mutation acquisition” as well as: “the correlation of genotype to phenotype.”

The objective was not merely individual mutations.

It was the endpoint population itself.

Prediction Was Only the First Layer

PROPHECY was never designed to stop at prediction.

DARPA required participants to construct what it called: “biological validation systems” and repeatedly emphasized: “testing and validation of the system and algorithm.”

The BAA instructed performers to: “Perform a ‘real world’ test of the predictive algorithm and biological validation system…”

The purpose of that exercise was to determine whether researchers could: “reproducibly predict the genomic, proteomic, and/or functional attributes of the ending viral population.”

DARPA further instructed participants to: “develop a research strategy and solicit collaborations from partners” that would assist in: “applying their predictive methodology to surveillance data from the real world.”

The architecture described by PROPHECY therefore extended beyond prediction alone.

The program sought to construct systems capable not only of generating future pathogen blueprints, but also of attempting to validate those predictions experimentally and through subsequent observational frameworks.

Bottom Line

Amid COVID-19 debates, public attention has focused on later programs such as DEFUSE, ADEPT, pandemic mRNA platforms, and Operation Warp Speed.

But PROPHECY confirms that by 2010, DARPA was openly attempting to build a generalized predictive infrastructure capable of deciding the future characteristics of purported pathogens, using those predictions to enable drugs and vaccines in advance, and constructing systems intended to validate those predictions experimentally and through later observational frameworks.

Most importantly, the effort was never intended for a single disease.

PROPHECY sought to build this capability for: “any virus.”

Whether viewed as predictive biodefense, anticipatory genomics, preemptive countermeasure development, or something else, the architecture described by DARPA followed a remarkably consistent sequence:

• vaccines as the objective;
• future pathogen blueprints as the enabling technology;
• “validation” systems as the final layer.

That architecture may ultimately prove to be one of the most consequential and least understood developments in the history of modern biodefense research.

Tyler Durden Sat, 07/11/2026 - 19:50

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DHS Deports Convicted Child Rapist Gov. Tim Walz Pardoned

The Department of Homeland Security deported Tou Lue Vang on Friday, the Laotian national Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz pardoned last month in an effort to keep him in the country.

Vang, 42, entered the United States illegally and built a life in Minnesota that included, by his own admission, sexually abusing a 10-year-old girl. He pleaded guilty in 2006 to first-degree criminal sexual conduct after admitting he abused the girl over four years, starting in 2002. When police arrested him in 2005, he offered no denial. Instead, he told investigators that marrying and having sex with girls as young as 12 was a cultural practice.

The Department of Homeland Security said Vang also offered his victim $10 to stay quiet while the abuse continued.

By pleading guilty, Vang avoided prison, but lost legal status. A judge issued him a final removal order in October 2006, and under any normal enforcement regime, that would have been the end of the story. Instead, Vang stayed in the country for nearly two decades, until Trump administration agents caught up with him last year through Operation Metro Surge, a Minnesota-based immigration enforcement effort.

Records show Vang applied for a pardon in July 2025, anticipating his inevitable deportation. Walz granted it through the state's three-member pardon board, which also includes Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minnesota Chief Justice Natalie Hudson. The pardon wiped Vang's conviction from his record entirely.

"The Minnesota Board of Pardons made a unanimous decision to grant Tou Vang this pardon after an exhaustive process which included a statement of support for the pardon from the victim, a recommendation to grant the pardon from the Clemency Review Commission and a large number of community support letters," Ellison's office said in a statement.

The New York Times noted that Democratic governors "have long faced scrutiny for pardoning immigrants with criminal records who have served their sentences, in an effort to slow or halt their deportations. They often weigh a number of factors as part of their decision, including the severity of the crime," and added that "Mr. Vang's situation is notable in that it involves a sex offense against a child, a type of crime that is widely reviled."

The Department of Homeland Security condemned the decision to pardon him.

"These are the criminal illegal aliens [Walz] and his Minnesota sanctuary politicians are protecting," Lauren Bis, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement. "Tou Lue Vang lost his legal status following his conviction for repeatedly sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl."

While the pardon effectively removed the conviction that was the basis for his deportation, the Department of Homeland Security announced Friday that ICE had taken Vang into custody and removed him from the United States despite the efforts of Walz and Ellison.

.@ICEgov has DEPORTED Tou Vang, the illegal alien CHILD RAPIST @GovTimWalz pardoned in an attempt to allow him to remain in our country. While Walz and his fellow sanctuary politicians fight to protect heinous criminals like this, we will continue putting the safety of the…

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) July 10, 2026

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the arrest himself in a video posted to X. "Just weeks ago, a convicted sex offender and a foreign national was shielded from deportation by the Governor of Minnesota," Rubio said. "Laotian national Tou Lue Vang was convicted of repeatedly sexually abusing a 10-year-old girl in the state of Minnesota. He even tried to pay his victim for her silence. And he called his heinous crimes a minor thing." Rubio noted the pardon came "just days before this foreign sex offender was scheduled to be deported," and said Walz "issued him a pardon setting him free to once again endanger the children of America." He described the response in plain terms. "This week I revoked his legal status in the United States and as a result, federal agents took him into custody. And as of today, he has been removed from the United States. Because of our action, this foreign criminal will never pose a threat to any American ever again." Rubio closed with a broader point about the arrangement voters are being asked to accept. "Americans must never be forced by their elected leaders to live alongside foreign sex criminals who have no right to begin with to reside in our country. This administration will always stand with the American people and defend them from violent criminals."

Laotian national Tou Lue Vang was convicted of sexually abusing a 10-year-old girl in Minnesota. He was set to be deported until @GovTimWalz issued him a pardon. Then, I revoked his legal status. @ICEgov has removed him from the U.S. and he will never endanger another…

— Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) July 10, 2026

The White House was even more blunt. "This case exposes the depravity of the Radical Left: they will literally pardon child rapists and defy federal law to protect criminal illegals," it said in a Friday statement.

Tyler Durden Sat, 07/11/2026 - 19:15