'Pocket recession' tool used for first time since 1977 to bypass Congress's power over budget.

Donald Trump has told the House speaker, Mike Johnson, that he won't be spending $4.9bn in congressionally approved foreign aid, in effect cutting the budget without going through the legislative branch.

Trump, who sent a letter to Johnson on Thursday, is using what is known as a "pocket rescission" - when a president submits a request to Congress to not spend approved funds toward the end of the fiscal year, so that the legislature cannot act on the request in the 45-day timeframe and the money goes unspent as a result. It's the first time in nearly 50 years a president has used one. The fiscal year draws to a close at the end of September.

The letter was posted on Friday morning on the X account of the White House office of management and budget. It said the funding would be cut from the state department and the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, an early target of Trump's efforts to cut foreign aid.

Ankara has strongly opposed the Jewish state's military campaign in Gaza.

Türkiye has severed all commercial and economic ties with Israel, as well as closing its airspace to some Israeli flights, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has announced. The two countries have been at odds for months over Israel's military campaign in Gaza, with Türkiye accusing the country of committing genocide.

In an address to the national parliament on Friday, Fidan said:

"Türkiye has completely cut off our trade with Israel and closed our ports to Israeli ships. We are not allowing container ships carrying weapons and ammunition to Israel to enter our ports, and airplanes to go into our airspace."

Fidan also said Turkish-flagged ships are barred from calling at Israeli ports, and Israeli vessels are barred from Turkish ports.

A Turkish diplomatic source told Reuters that the flight restrictions only target official Israeli flights and planes with weapons or ammunition, not routine transit by commercial carriers.

Ladies and gentlemen, step right up to witness the greatest show on Earth: the European Union's spectacular three-ring circus of economic masochism, where every policy is designed to hurt Europeans while helping everyone else, and the ringmasters pat themselves on the back for their moral superiority as the tent burns down around them.

In the center ring, we have François Bayrou, the 74-year-old French Prime Minister who's about to become the sixth casualty under Macron's leadership — because why learn from mistakes when you can just repeat them with increasing enthusiasm? Bayrou's latest trick is making €44 billion disappear from French government spending while somehow expecting French voters to applaud. He already has eliminated Easter Monday and Victory Day as national holidays because apparently, the French need fewer days to celebrate their heritage and more days to work themselves into poverty. Brilliant!

But wait, there's more! While French citizens get their benefits frozen at 2025 levels — because who needs inflation adjustments when you have moral clarity — France continues shipping €3 billion in military aid to Ukraine. That's right, folks: French grandmothers can eat cake at 2025 prices while Ukrainian soldiers get 2025 weapons at 2025 exchange rates. It's the kind of mathematical gymnastics that would make a circus acrobat weep with envy.

The best part? Bayrou knows he's politically dead on September 8th when parliament votes no confidence. Even Marine Le Pen and the far-left are united in wanting him gone — a political achievement that requires special talent. But hey, at least he'll go down swinging at French citizens while foreign governments cash their checks.

The extraordinary move shows how US President Donald Trump is continuing to indulge its close ally, Israel.

The United States has announced it will deny Palestinian officials visas, meaning they will be prevented from attending a UN General Assembly meeting in New York in September, where France has said it will push for the recognition of a Palestinian state.

The extraordinary move shows how US President Donald Trump is continuing to indulge his country's close ally, Israel, which is totally opposed to the establishment of a state in Palestine, where it maintains a military occupation and continues to wage war on the Gaza Strip.

"Secretary of State Marco Rubio is denying and revoking visas from members of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestinian Authority (PA) ahead of the upcoming United Nations General Assembly," the State Department said in a statement.

Director of the National Institute of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, sat down for an extended interview with ZeroHedge. Bhattacharya, long known as one of the fiercest critics of lockdown orthodoxy, has gone from blacklisted dissenter to running the world's largest biomedical research agency. He carries into his new post a distrust of entrenched power, a skepticism of politicized science, and an insistence that free inquiry — not censorship — must guide American health policy.

What follows is a candid conversation, in Bhattacharya's own words, on censorship, woke politics in research, the threat of bioweapons, and why he believes science cannot exist without free speech.

The EU-backed Ukrainian regime's blowing up of a major pipeline delivering vital oil supply to Europe is an astounding signal of self-destruction. It demonstrates how insane the European Union's leadership has become in its obsession with defeating Russia, no matter the cost. The insanity means that the interests of EU member states and European citizens are willingly sacrificed. Russophobic Eurocrats who have shunned all diplomatic engagement with Moscow are in effect funding the destruction of Europe.

In another development, as Russian airstrikes on Kiev this week hit European Union and British government sites in the Ukrainian capital, EU and British politicians were outraged, condemning Russia for "barbaric attacks" on their delegations. Yet it is these same European and British politicians who are pushing conflict to the brink of no return as they insist on arming a NeoNazi regime to continue striking Russian civilian targets and refuse to listen to Russia's historic grievances about how this conflict evolved.

The Ukrainian regime, bankrolled by EU taxpayers, launched multiple drone and missile attacks on the Druzhba pipeline, which supplies EU member states Hungary and Slovakia. The pipeline supplies those states with about 50 percent of their oil imports. The attacks knocked out pipeline infrastructure in Russian territory. Hungary and Slovakia were cut off from crude oil supplies for several days. Budapest and Bratislava angrily protested to the European Union leadership that the sabotage was an unacceptable assault on the sovereign, vital interests.

However, the European Commission in Brussels responded with remarkable indifference, noting that Hungary and Slovakia's 90-day emergency stockpiles of oil were sufficient to carry the countries over the interruption in supply. The complacency of the EU leadership is extraordinary. So, a non-EU state cuts off the energy supply of EU members, and there is no reprimand for the sabotage. The insouciance is tantamount to giving the Ukrainian regime a green light to carry out more such attacks.

Three - interlocked - dates ahead of us could not be more crucial in shaping the next configuration of the currently incandescent geopolitical chessboard.

1.August 31/September 1st. Tianjin - half-an-hour by high-speed rail (120 km, roughly $8) from Beijing. The annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), with all 10 member-states, two observers (Afghanistan and Mongolia) and 14 dialogue partners (plenty from Southeast Asia). Crucially, Putin, Xi and Modi (his first visit to China in 7 years) will be on the same table, as well as Iran's Pezeshkian. That's a compounded BRICS/SCO heavyweight show. This summit may be a turning point for the SCO as much as the summit in Kazan last year was for BRICS.

2.September 3. The Victory Day Parade in Tian'anmen Square, officially celebrating the 80th anniversary of "the Victory of the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War". No less than 26 heads of state will be present, including Putin (on a 4-day state visit). They come from all over the Global South, but none from the Global North.

3.September 3. Vladivostok. The start of the 10th Eastern Economic Forum (EEF), a must-go to understand the finer points of the Russian national strategic priority to develop the Arctic and the Russian Far East, including vast tracts of Siberia; that's a mirror policy of the Chinese effort to "Go West", which started in 1999, to develop Tibet and Xinjiang. A who's who of corporate and business circles from all latitudes across Eurasia will be present in Vladivostok. Putin addresses the plenary session right after his return from China.

Taken together, these three dates span the whole spectrum of the Russia-China strategic partnership; the increasingly interlocked geopolitical and geoeconomic aspects of Eurasia integration and Global South solidarity; and the concerted push by Eurasia actors to accelerate the drive towards a multi-nodal, equanimous system of international relations.

Very turbulent times are ahead, and unfortunately, we are already seeing Europe collapse.

In recent days, one alarming report after another has emerged about the European economies. The political elites and their mouthpieces, the mainstream media, can no longer ignore it. Things are not going well — and that is putting it mildly. The situation is bad and will get worse. This is something some of us had anticipated for quite some time, and alert economists have been saying and warning about.

Let's start with one of the richest countries in Europe: the Netherlands. Although small in size, the wealth enjoyed by elites and, to some extent, citizens some twenty years ago was enormous. I would even venture to say that, in some respects, the Netherlands was richer than Switzerland.

But due to many factors — bad politics, and the emergence of countries like China and, to a certain extent, India and Russia, whose economies have become stronger and their citizens richer — the Netherlands is now on the verge of collapse, like almost all wealthy EU countries, or rather, Western countries.

Beijing has said Washington carries the primary responsibility for disarmament, as it has one of the world's biggest arsenals.

China said on Wednesday that it would not participate in denuclearization talks with the US and Russia, calling the idea "unreasonable and unrealistic," since it holds a minimal number of nuclear weapons for national defense.

Asked to comment on US President Donald Trump's proposal for Beijing to join the initiative, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun responded that China and the US are not at the same level of nuclear capabilities.

"The country sitting on the world's biggest nuclear arsenal should earnestly fulfill its special and primary responsibility for nuclear disarmament," he said, referring to the US.

Gou stressed that Beijing follows a strict "no first use" policy and keeps its stockpile at the minimum level required for national security. "China never engages in arms race with anyone," he said, calling it "neither reasonable nor realistic to ask China to join."

Samantha Power has admitted that Washington financially backed the pro-Western presidential election winner.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) invested tens of millions of dollars in Moldova to support pro-EU President Maia Sandu, former USAID chief Samantha Power has admitted in a call with Russian pranksters.

Speaking to the notorious duo Vovan and Lexus, who apparently pretended to be Western officials, Power recalled that under her leadership, USAID made "unprecedented investments" in Moldova and "massively" expanded its presence in the country.

She recalled that in the USAID supplementals designated for Ukraine, there was always "tens of millions of dollars" earmarked for Moldova and noted that these funds "went much more further in Moldova than in Ukraine" given the country's small size.