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The Privacy ‘Zealots’ Were Right: Ad Tech’s Infrastructure Was Always A Risk
Monday March 9th, 2026 at 3:27 AM

AdExchanger
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I’ve been saying for years that addressable advertising was a strategic mistake.

Not because targeting shouldn’t exist, but because building an ecosystem dependent on granular identity, location trails and behavioral signals was always going to create exposure we couldn’t fully control. 

And if we’re being honest, the precision targeting story was oversold anyway. The industry sold a fantasy of surgical efficiency that independent research has continuously picked apart. Yet that narrative required massive data extraction to sustain itself.

The problem wasn’t advertising; it was the tech infrastructure we built to support it. 

Now we’re seeing efforts by the US government to use that infrastructure for the exact type of surveillance digital advertising’s critics have long warned about. We should have seen this coming.

The warnings we dismissed

Credit should go to Johnny Ryan of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and Open Markets Institute, who has been a longtime critic of surveillance advertising.

Ryan has called real-time bidding “the largest data breach ever recorded,” arguing that the bidstream exposes location and behavioral data to a long chain of companies that most users have never heard of. The point he was making was that when you widely broadcast personal data, you don’t get to tightly control where it ends up.

The Irish Council for Civil Liberties published research showing that RTB data could reveal the movements of military personnel. That revelation was a sober reminder that this isn’t just about shoe ads or conversion rates but structural exposure.

Online privacy advocate Max Schrems approached the issue from a different angle, but the underlying theme was similar. His work challenging EU-US data transfers focused on the reality that, once large pools of personal data exist, governments will try to access them. He has repeatedly argued that US surveillance law does not provide protections equivalent to EU fundamental rights – and EU courts agreed. His warning was about what happens when infrastructure and state power intersect.

Check My Ads has spent the past few years forcing these conversations into places where consequences actually happen: congressional hearings, bipartisan investigations and structural reforms like the AMERICA Act. The organization moved the debate out of industry panels and into the rooms where decisions actually get made. 

For a long time, much of the ad tech industry waved off these criticisms as dramatic or anti-business. It was easier to frame critics as zealots than to examine whether the system itself carried embedded risk.

The context has changed

Now the Department of Homeland Security is openly exploring how “big data and ad tech” tools might support investigations.

I’ve spoken privately with people inside large companies over the last few weeks. Many of them are uncomfortable. They understand the reputational risk and how DHS’ interest in ad tech looks from outside our industry. They don’t want their company’s brand sitting next to a headline about investigative data tools.

At the same time, they’re hearing from leadership that staying engaged with the government is pragmatic. You don’t want to isolate the company from whoever currently controls procurement budgets or regulatory levers. 

This tension reveals something important: In our industry, incentives shape behavior more than public statements or well-meaning buzzwords ever do.

We’re in a period where government authority feels more aggressive than maybe ever in our lifetimes. But accountability seems to be in short supply. Meanwhile, any public challenge to industry leadership draws retaliation. And government enforcement actions shift depending on the party in power. 

If that’s the environment we’re in, then it’s not alarmist to ask what happens when that same authority has access to infrastructure that maps behavior, movement and relationships at scale.

Can we honestly say those capabilities won’t be stretched?

And do we really believe the industry will stand up to government overreach if it means lost revenue or regulatory exposure?

It’s time to admit the truth

At the end of the day, ad tech built systems that collect far more data than necessary and distribute that data widely because it was profitable. We justified this by telling ourselves it’s just advertising. We convinced ourselves that anonymization and boilerplate compliance language were sufficient guardrails. 

But what happens when our lives and our civil rights – and those of our loved ones – might be at stake?

Critics said the architecture itself was the issue. Instead of listening thoughtfully, we got defensive.

They weren’t arguing that every ad executive wanted to enable surveillance. They weren’t trying to kill advertising. They were pointing out that once a system exists, it doesn’t stay neatly confined to its original use case. 

We didn’t want to hear it because the system was generating revenue and the precision narrative was convenient.

But Ryan, Schrems and Check My Ads weren’t zealots; they were right.

And we were wrong to dismiss them. Now, it’s time we say that plainly.

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Follow InterMedia Advertising and AdExchanger on LinkedIn.

For more articles featuring David Nyurenberg, click here.

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Scientists warn fake research is spreading faster than real science | ScienceDaily
Sunday March 8th, 2026 at 10:15 AM

Latest Science News -- ScienceDaily
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A new study from Northwestern University warns that coordinated scientific fraud is becoming increasingly common. From fabricated data to purchased authorships and paid citations, researchers say organized groups are manipulating the academic publishing system.

To investigate the issue, scientists combined large scale analysis of scientific publications with detailed case studies. While misconduct is often portrayed as the work of individual researchers cutting corners, the Northwestern team discovered something far more complex. Their findings reveal global networks of people and organizations working together to systematically exploit weaknesses in the publishing process.

The scale of the problem is striking. According to the researchers, fraudulent studies are now appearing at a faster rate than legitimate scientific publications. The authors say the findings should serve as a warning to the scientific community to strengthen safeguards before public trust in science begins to erode.

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Science must police itself better in order to preserve its integrity," said Northwestern's Luís A. N. Amaral, the study's senior author. "If we do not create awareness around this problem, worse and worse behavior will become normalized. At some point, it will be too late, and scientific literature will become completely poisoned. Some people worry that talking about this issue is attacking science. But I strongly believe we are defending science from bad actors. We need to be aware of the seriousness of this problem and take measures to address it."

Amaral studies complex social systems and serves as the Erastus Otis Haven Professor and professor of engineering sciences and applied mathematics at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering. Reese Richardson, a postdoctoral fellow in Amaral's laboratory, is the study's first author.

Investigating Scientific Fraud Networks

When the public hears about scientific fraud, the focus often falls on isolated cases involving falsified data, plagiarism or retracted studies. These incidents typically involve a single researcher attempting to advance their career by taking shortcuts in a highly competitive environment.

However, Amaral and his colleagues uncovered a much broader and largely hidden system. Their analysis revealed an extensive underground network operating largely out of public view.

"These networks are essentially criminal organizations, acting together to fake the process of science," Amaral said. "Millions of dollars are involved in these processes."

To understand how widespread the issue is, the team examined large collections of scientific data. This included records of retracted papers, editorial information and examples of duplicated images. Much of the information came from major scientific databases, including Web of Science (WoS), Elsevier's Scopus, National Library of Medicine's PubMed/MEDLINE and OpenAlex, which includes data from Microsoft Academic Graph, Crossref, ORCID, Unpaywall and other institutional repositories.

The researchers also gathered lists of de indexed journals. These are academic journals that databases have removed because they failed to meet quality or ethical standards. Additional sources included records of retracted studies from Retraction Watch, discussion comments from PubPeer and article metadata such as editor names, submission dates and acceptance dates from selected journals.

Paper Mills and the Business of Fake Research

After analyzing the data, the researchers identified coordinated operations involving paper mills, brokers and compromised journals. Paper mills function like production lines for academic manuscripts. They produce large numbers of papers and sell them to researchers who want to increase their publication record quickly.

These manuscripts often contain fabricated data, manipulated or stolen images, plagiarized text and sometimes claims that are scientifically impossible.

"More and more scientists are being caught up in paper mills," Amaral said. "Not only can they buy papers, but they can buy citations. Then, they can appear like well-reputed scientists when they have barely conducted their own research at all."

"Paper mills operate by a variety of different models," Richardson added. "So, we have only just been able to scratch the surface of how they operate. But they sell basically anything that can be used to launder a reputation. They often sell authorship slots for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. A person might pay more money for the first author position or less money for a fourth author position. People also can pay to get papers they have written automatically accepted in a journal through a sham peer-review process."

To detect additional papers produced through these operations, Amaral's group launched a separate project that automatically scans published materials science and engineering studies. The system searches for authors who incorrectly identify the instruments used in their experiments. Findings from that work were accepted for publication in the journal PLOS ONE.

Brokers, Journal Hijacking and Coordinated Fraud

The team found that fraudulent networks rely on several strategies to spread fake research.

  1. Groups of researchers collaborate to publish papers across multiple journals, even though the work is fraudulent. When the misconduct is uncovered, the papers are later retracted.
  2. Brokers act as middlemen who arrange the publication of fraudulent papers in compromised journals.
  3. Fraudulent activity often concentrates in specific scientific fields that are more vulnerable to manipulation.
  4. Organized groups find ways to bypass quality control measures, including journal de indexing.

"Brokers connect all the different people behind the scenes," Amaral said. "You need to find someone to write the paper. You need to find people willing to pay to be the authors. You need to find a journal where you can get it all published. And you need editors in that journal who will accept that paper."

In some cases, these groups avoid legitimate journals entirely and instead take over abandoned ones. When a legitimate publication stops operating, fraudsters may acquire the website or domain name and revive it as a vehicle for fraudulent publishing.

"This happened to the journal HIV Nursing," Richardson said. "It was formerly the journal of a professional nursing organization in the U.K., then it stopped publishing, and its online domain lapsed. An organization bought the domain name and started publishing thousands of papers on subjects completely unrelated to nursing, all indexed in Scopus."

Protecting the Integrity of Science

To address the growing threat, Amaral and Richardson say the scientific community needs a broad strategy. This includes closer monitoring of editorial practices, stronger tools to detect fabricated studies, deeper understanding of the networks enabling fraud and major changes to the incentive systems that drive scientific publishing.

The researchers also stress the urgency of tackling these problems before artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more deeply embedded in the scientific literature.

"If we're not prepared to deal with the fraud that's already occurring, then we're certainly not prepared to deal with what generative AI can do to scientific literature," Richardson said. "We have no clue what's going to end up in the literature, what's going to be regarded as scientific fact and what's going to be used to train future AI models, which then will be used to write more papers."

Amaral said the project was personally discouraging but necessary.

"This study is probably the most depressing project I've been involved with in my entire life," Amaral said. "Since I was a kid, I was excited about science. It's distressing to see others engage in fraud and in misleading others. But if you believe that science is useful and important for humanity, then you have to fight for it."

The study, "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly," was supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

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ICE Kidnaps Journalist Who Was Covering Them | The New Republic
Saturday March 7th, 2026 at 9:07 PM

The New Republic
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Immigration and Customs Enforcement are trying to deport a journalist covering immigration, in one of the most egregious attacks on freedom of speech under Donald Trump’s administration so far, Migrant Insider reported Friday.

Estefany Maria Rodríguez Flores, a reporter who’d been covering a series of immigration raids in Nashville, Tennessee, was headed to the gym with her husband Wednesday when her vehicle was swarmed by federal agents. Her car bore the name of her newsroom, Nashville Noticias.

The agents did not produce a warrant for her arrest, her attorney told Migrant Insider. They simply presented her with a Notice to Appear—the first of many steps toward deportation.

Rodríguez Flores, who entered the country legally in 2021 and later married a U.S. citizen, was in the process of applying for permanent residency. When her recent appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement was canceled and an agent was unable to find her name in the system, she got a handwritten note rescheduling her for a meeting March 17—in less than two weeks.

It wasn’t immediately clear where Rodríguez was taken.

“We don’t know where she is,” her husband, Alejandro, who is still in Tennessee with their child, told Migrant Insider. He hasn’t been able to speak to her since Wednesday.

The ICE detainee locator originally placed her in Alabama, but then she disappeared altogether, the outlet reported. She now appears to have been transferred to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, where detainees have alleged repeated sexual assault.

Rodríguez is a reporter for Nashville Noticias, a local Spanish-language outlet that serves as a lifeline to immigrant communities most affected by the Trump administration’s sweeping deportation scheme. Rodríguez often reported critically on immigration policy, her attorney told Migrant Insider.

Her abduction follows the shocking arrests of former CNN host Don Lemon and local journalist Georgia Fort, who were reporting on a protest at Cities Church in Minnesota. In October, Mario Guevara, an Atlanta-based Spanish-language reporter, was deported after being arrested at a No Kings protest. Guevara’s removal was widely criticized as the first case of a journalist being deported in retaliation for their work under the Trump administration.

President Donald Trump on Friday demanded Iran’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER,” but what does that look like? According to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, that’s up to Trump himself and not Iran.

“What the president means is that when he as commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces determines that Iran no longer poses a threat to the United States of America and the goals of Operation Epic Fury has been fully realized, than Iran will essentially be in a place of unconditional surrender, whether they say it themselves or not,” Leavitt said Friday, in response to a reporter asking whether Trump means that “the regime has to fully relinquish control.”

“Frankly, they don’t have a lot of people to say that for them because the United States and the State of Israel have completely wiped out more than 50 leaders of the former terrorist regime, including the supreme leader himself,” Leavitt added.

It’s absurd to demand a surrender and then claim that “no, we will decide when you’ve surrendered,” but that appears to be the stance of the Trump administration at this time. Trump himself told Axios Friday that “unconditional surrender could be that [the Iranians] announce it. But it could also be when they can’t fight any longer because they don’t have anyone or anything to fight with.”

Reading between the lines, it seems that Trump wants to unilaterally decide when hostilities with Iran are over, and would prefer to inflict heavy damage on the country’s defenses first. But considering that the U.S. was apparently spurred to attack Iran by Israel, surrender may be moot as long as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu still sees advantages in bombing Iran. Whether Iran “surrenders” or not, the bombings will continue until Trump and Netanyahu decide otherwise.

American forces are no longer capable of supplying missiles to U.S. allies amid its war with Iran.

Andrius Kubilius, the European Union’s defense and space commissioner, said Friday that the continent is facing a “huge challenge” in stepping up its defense production to adequately fill the gap left by the U.S. with regards to Ukraine.

“It’s very clear that after the Iranian crisis ... it became more urgent for us in Europe to ramp up production of air defense and anti-ballistic missiles,” Kubilius said in Warsaw. “Americans really will not be able to provide enough of those missiles, both for the Gulf countries, for [the] American army itself, and also for Ukrainian needs.”

For the winter season alone, Kubilius estimated that Ukraine needs 700 Patriot, PAC-2, and PAC-3 missiles, which he noted is “more or less equal to the number of missiles that American manufacturers are capable of producing in a year.”

Polish defense minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz was in lockstep with Kubilius’s assessment, informing reporters Friday that the situation in Europe “is really critical.”

“It is clear that we are going to have to develop our missile production very quickly and very urgently,” he said.

Kosiniak-Kamysz noted that the U.S. will prioritize replenishing its stockpiles in the Middle East, adding to delivery delays to Europe, especially if the war drags on.

Military officials have stressed since Sunday that fighting Iran has already drastically depleted America’s missile defense systems.

In a closed-door meeting with lawmakers Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine reportedly said that Iran’s Shahed attack drones had proved a more difficult problem than initially predicted.

One source told CNN that the U.S. has been “burning” through long-range precision-guided missiles.

It’s not clear exactly how long the conflict is expected to go on. Per Trump’s own estimates, the war could rage for a few days, or several weeks, or “forever.”

So far, six U.S. soldiers have been killed in the conflict, as have more than 20 Iranian officials, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Eighteen American soldiers have also been seriously injured. More than 1,200 Iranian civilians have been killed, including 176 children, dozens of whom were at a girls’ school in the country’s south.

On Friday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News that reports of Russia giving Iran intelligence to target U.S. assets didn’t matter—a baffling answer given that Iran has already killed multiple U.S. service members in retaliation.

“We have confirmed reports from U.S. officials that Russia is providing intelligence to Iran to help it target U.S. assets in the region,” Fox News’s John Roberts asked Leavitt. “I’m sure this is something that does not please the president whatsoever. Has he spoken to Putin about it?”

“Well, look, I’ll leave that to the president to answer himself, but what I will tell you, John, is we don’t comment on intelligence reports that are leaked to the press,” Leavitt responded. “Whether or not this happened, frankly, it does not really matter, because President Trump and the United States military are absolutely decimating the rogue Iranian terrorist regime.”

Leavitt was quickly rebuked for the tone-deaf statement.

“Dear @PressSec: You need to apologize for your ludicrous statement. Why won’t you condemn Russia for helping Iran?” Representative Ted Lieu wrote on X. “Did the Russian intelligence info help Iran: Kill 6 U.S. soldiers? Hit 11 U.S. bases? Hit U.S. embassies and consulates? Hit U.S. allies?”

“It doesn’t matter if Russia is helping Iran kill US service members??” liberal podcaster Tommy Vietor wrote. “What is this moron talking about?”

Leavitt, perhaps hearing some of the criticism, attempted to clarify her position later that day, with support from the White House Rapid Response X account, which called the situation a hoax—but all Leavitt did was repeat herself.

“Why doesn’t it matter if the U.S. military is being put in danger by Russia? Is that what the president believes, as well?” a reporter asked Leavitt later that day.

“What I meant … is that it clearly is not making a difference with respect to the military operations in Iran because we are completely decimating them. As I said earlier, we’ve taken out nearly 30 of their ships, their navy has been deemed combat ineffective. Ninety percent reduction in ballistic missile retaliatory strikes against the United States and our Gulf Arab partners in the region.… The United States military is the best and most lethal fighting force in the world.”

Leavitt again did not directly address the report that Russia is collaborating with Iran.

The U.S. Army spontaneously canceled a training exercise for an elite team this week, raising concerns that the soldiers may soon be expected to deploy to Iran.

The headquarters element of the 82nd Airborne Division, stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, pulled out of a major training exercise earlier this week. The brigade is a rapid-reaction paratrooper division, comprising up to 5,000 soldiers that are capable of deploying anywhere in the world within 18 hours. They are specialized in missions that include parachute assault, reinforcing U.S. embassies, and enabling emergency evacuations.

The rest of the 82nd Division continued training at Fort Polk in Louisiana.

Deployment orders had not been issued as of Friday, military officials told The Washington Post. The unidentified Army men noted to the Post that the division is expected to deploy a helicopter unit to the Middle East, a plan set before the war began, though that won’t happen until later in the spring.

Nonetheless, military officials are steeling themselves for the worst.

“We’re all preparing for something—just in case,” one official familiar with the issue told the Post.

A spokesperson for the Army referred the Post to a statement that read: “Due to operations security we do not discuss future or hypothetical movements.”

Talk of escalating the conflict with Iran has ramped up in recent days among chief White House officials, at times in a remarkably disaffected way. The president declared on Friday that he wants “unconditional surrender” from Iran, and would not negotiate a peace deal without it.

Republicans are discussing the potentially unavoidable reality of a U.S. ground invasion in Iran; meanwhile, Iranian officials have already said they are “confident” the country could counter a U.S. ground invasion.

When asked by Time if Americans should be worried about Iran attacking them on U.S. soil, Donald Trump responded: “I guess.”

“But I think they’re worried about that all the time,” he continued. “We think about it all the time. We plan for it. But yeah, you know, we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.”

The self-titled “peace president” has so far used his second term to sweep foreign cities, massacre foreign leadership, and indiscriminately bomb civilian targets, such as elementary schools in Tehran.

So far, six U.S. soldiers have been killed in the conflict, as have more than 20 Iranian officials, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Eighteen American soldiers have also been seriously injured. More than 1,200 Iranian civilians have been killed, including 176 children, dozens of whom were bombed at a girls’ school in south Iran.

The conflict entered its seventh day on Friday. Trump has still not directly addressed the American people on the issue.

Trump administration officials scrambled Friday to explain away the latest horrendous jobs numbers, but couldn’t conjure up more than blaming the weather or fake numbers.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported earlier in the day that the U.S. job market had shed 92,000 jobs in February, meaning that the U.S. economy has lost 19,000 jobs since April 2025.

National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett struggled on CNBC to summon an explanation for the “surprisingly negative” report that did not include Donald Trump’s disastrous economic policies.

Hassett blamed a spate of severe winter weather, a massive strike at a major health care provider in California and Hawaii, and a recent update to the BLS’s birth-death model that tracks the opening and closing of businesses.

He urged people to look at the average growth: “If you take the average over a few months we had a surprisingly positive one last month, and a surprisingly negative one this one, but on average it’s about what we expect to be seeing because immigration has gone down so much the break-even employment is probably in the 30 or 40,000 jobs a month range.”

The Trump administration has been pushing Americans to lower their expectations for job growth to reflect a labor market that doesn’t rely on undocumented immigrants. Trump officials have argued that a job market that used to produce 200,000 jobs a month should now be expected to churn out closer to 50,000.

In reality, the average labor market growth in 2025 was only half of what Hassett is selling—closer to an average of 15,000 new jobs per month. Meanwhile, five of the last nine months have seen job losses, indicating a policy-driven downward trend, not one caused by snow or strike.

But Hassett indicated that he was focused on pushing something else entirely: Trump’s violent and illegal efforts to steal oil from foreign nations as a sign that stability was on the horizon.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer also tried to blame the “bad report” on weather and the strike, before just blatantly lying about the publicly available numbers.

“That has been resolved, so we’re hoping to see those numbers tick back up next month,” Chavez-DeRemer said on Fox Business. “But overall, we’ve gained 60,000 new jobs over the last two months.”

In reality, the latest report saw 126,000 jobs added in January, and 92,000 taken away in February. That’s just 31,000 new jobs. Either Chavez-DeRemer is too stupid to do the math, or she thinks you are. She’s currently under investigation for misconduct.

One of Elon Musk’s former DOGE minions has been tapped to run AI at the Pentagon.

In a post on X, the Department of Defense announced Friday that it was appointing Gavin Kliger, who worked at the Office of Personnel Management last year helping to purge the federal workforce, as chief data officer, “a role that places him at the center of the Department’s most ambitious AI efforts.”

“We are in a global competition for military AI dominance, and America must build on its leadership to extend our advantage over adversaries,” Kliger is quoted as saying in the post. “My mission is to integrate the unparalleled innovation of America’s private sector with the Department’s operational expertise to rapidly deliver advanced AI capabilities to our warfighters. By driving pace-setting projects with wartime urgency, we will ensure cutting-edge technology translates into decisive battlefield advantages for the United States.”

Kliger’s past with DOGE wasn’t pretty. He was assigned to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to help DOGE take over and dismantle the watchdog agency. Kliger happened to own up to $365,000 in stocks in seven companies that the CFPB regulated, including Tesla, Apple, Alphabet, Alibaba, and Berkshire Hathaway, as well as two cryptocurrencies. When CFPB’s lawyers told him this was prohibited for agency employees, he fired the lawyers.

Kliger also has a shady record on social media. Reuters reported last year that he has reposted content from white supremacist Nick Fuentes and misogynist Andrew Tate, and expressed racist views as well as xenophobic views about immigrants. Now, he’ll be working with AI as the Pentagon continues Donald Trump’s reckless war with Iran.

The DOD is already using AI to help plan airstrikes in Iran despite an ongoing standoff between the Trump administration and AI laboratory Anthropic. The firm is insisting that Claude, its generative AI model, not be a part of autonomous weapons systems and is seeking guarantees that Claude would not assist in the mass surveillance of U.S. citizens.

But now, someone who had few—if any—ethical scruples over racism, bigotry, misogyny, or purging government employees will be at the center of AI efforts during a war. Kliger will probably be happy to assist in bombing Iran without regard to innocent lives.

As more than 1,000 Iranian men, women, and children lay dead after days of bombardment from U.S. and Israeli missiles, the official White House X account on Thursday evening posted a video edit of scenes from popular action movies spliced with actual strike footage from their war on Iran. The clip, captioned “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY” is the red-pilled, “America, Fuck Yeah” style of edit that an 18-year-old college Republican might repost on TikTok.

The video opens with a clip of Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man 2 saying, “Wake up, Daddy’s home.” Hypermasculine characters like William Wallace, Maverick Mitchell, John Wick, and Superman make appearances. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is also featured saying, “FAFO.” The clip ends with the “flawless victory” tag from the Mortal Kombat franchise.

It’s incredibly bleak to watch the Trump administration treat a war with real death and real suffering like it’s a video game.

“Hundreds of people are dead. Little girls are dead. Six Americans are dead. Others are risking their lives. Millions across the Middle East are terrified,” liberal podcaster Jon Favreau commented. “It’s not a video game. It’s not a meme. It’s not another chance to troll the libs. It’s fucking war.”

“Not only wrong, unbalanced, no comprehension [of] the horror of war,” writer Peter Oborne said. “This video is evil.”

“Quite simply one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen on here. Whatever you think of the awful Iranian régime, the White House treating bombing raids like a cheap video game is gut-wrenchingly shocking,” European journalist Alex Taylor wrote. “America, your country is going to hell.”

The White House had not been happy with Kristi Noem for quite some time.

Donald Trump booted the 54-year-old from her position atop the Department of Homeland Security Thursday following a string of abysmal appearances this week before Congress. But the hearings, as it turns out, were just the straw that broke the camel’s back for Noem’s tenure in the executive branch.

Her position among the higher echelons of the Trump administration had become increasingly tenuous in recent months, most notably after ICE agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, marring Trump’s immigration agenda—a chief MAGA priority—in the process.

Trump spoke with Republican representatives earlier this week about his frustration with Noem, floating the idea of replacing her, according to several Republican lawmakers and three people familiar with the president’s private discussions that spoke with NBC News.

Nonetheless, the news of Noem’s departure—which came by way of a Thursday afternoon Truth Social post—came as a surprise to practically everyone. Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, who was tapped to replace the outbound secretary, told reporters that he had only heard of the decision moments before it became public. Noem, meanwhile, conducted a staged press conference (which singularly featured law enforcement officials and no real journalists), answering preplanned questions while apparently still under the belief that she was running Homeland Security. Trump reportedly alerted her before posting about his decision, but Noem still acted unaware during the event.

Another point of contention between Noem and the president: the $220 million advertising contract she used to support ICE. Trump has attempted to wash his hands of the scandal, which has grown to include allegations that Noem directed more than half of the budget into the pockets of her friends and allies, despite the fact that he appeared in full support of the initiative early last year.

She spent even more public funds, originally intended for deportation efforts, on a pair of luxury jets, decked out with private bedrooms and a bar. To keep the White House’s ire away from the needless spending, Noem lent the planes to First Lady Melania Trump, who reportedly flew on them on several occasions. Administration officials told Axios that involving Melania was more or less an “insurance policy” to keep Trump’s aggravation at bay.

Noem’s blankie scandal only further exacerbated tensions. The so-called ICE Barbie allegedly had her rumored beau, expired special employee Corey Lewandowski, fire a Coast Guard pilot last May after she neglected to bring her favorite weighted blanket onto the second flight of one of her trips. DHS insiders later suggested that the real cause of Noem’s freakout was a missing bag with potentially embarrassing contents.

“She burnt up a ton of goodwill,” an adviser who spoke with Trump told Axios. “It was everywhere. It was everything.”

In fact, “she had no goodwill on Capitol Hill,” the adviser said. “She mismanaged FEMA. She didn’t show up to hearings. She was disrespectful. No one liked her.”

Donald Trump only has one requirement for who should lead Iran after its leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in airstrikes last week: be on good terms with the U.S. and its top ally.

They need to “treat the United States and Israel well,” Trump told CNN’s Dana Bash in a phone interview Friday morning. Trump envisions Iran working out like Venezuela, he said to Bash, adding that he “may be” OK with a religious leader leading the country.

Trump said he wanted to pick Iran’s next leader, repeating what he said on Thursday. “It’s going to work very easily, it’s going to work like it did in Venezuela,” he said according to Bash, who relayed the conversation on the network. “We have a wonderful leader there. She’s doing a fantastic job, and it’s going to work like that.”

In Venezuela, the U.S. military abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro early on the morning of January 3 but did not implement a plan of succession, instead allowing Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez to succeed Maduro while Trump declared himself “acting president” of the South American country.

A similar situation is not likely to happen in Iran by Trump’s own admission, as has claimed multiple times this week that many of the likely candidates to lead Iran are dead. One possible candidate that has emerged as a possible new leader is Khamenei’s son, cleric Mojtaba Khamenei, but Trump has rejected him.

“Khamenei’s son is unacceptable to me. We want someone that will bring harmony and peace to Iran,” Trump said Thursday, adding that Mojtaba Khamenei’s accession to power would lead to war again “in five years.”

Trump’s words mean that he simply wants compliance and not the total regime change some on the right, as well his supporters among the Iranian diaspora, have been calling for. It once again shows that there was no administration plan for a postwar Iran, and that Trump has been making it up as he goes along, recklessly bombing the country with no clear end in sight.

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Fertiliser disruption from Iran conflict prompts global food shortage warnings
Friday March 6th, 2026 at 6:35 AM

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The conflict in Iran is disrupting fertiliser production and exports in the Middle East, tightening global supplies and raising fears of higher food prices, industry executives and analysts have warned.

The Middle East is one of the world’s largest fertiliser producers, while the Strait of Hormuz is a crucial shipping route for exports. About 35 per cent of global urea exports pass through the waterway, according to CRU data. Urea is the most widely used nitrogen fertiliser, which in turn underpins around half of global food production.

The route also handles 45 per cent of global sulphur exports, a key ingredient used to produce phosphate fertilisers, as well as significant volumes of ammonia, a key ingredient for nitrogen fertilisers.

“We shouldn’t underestimate what this potentially could mean for global food production,” said Svein Tore Holsether, chief executive of Europe’s largest fertiliser group Yara.

He added that the focus on oil and gas was “overshadowing” the impact on the fertiliser industry. “If you’re not getting [fertiliser] into the field of the farmers, yields could go down by up to 50 per cent in the first harvest,” he said.

If the disruption continues, consumers could see higher prices for bread within six to 10 weeks, eggs within a few months and pork and broiler chicken within six months, estimates Raj Patel, food system expert at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. 

Fertiliser prices have already jumped sharply. Granular urea prices in the Middle East have risen by about $130 to around $575-650 a tonne since Friday, while Egyptian export prices have climbed by around $125 to around $610-625 a tonne over the same period, according to Argus.

European ammonia futures have also surged, with a 1,000 tonne April cargo trading at $725 a tonne — about $130 higher than when the contract last traded in mid-February.

Analysts say the disruption could prove even more damaging than the food shock triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when energy and fertiliser costs surged and global food prices hit record highs.

“When prices spiked in 2022 it was extraordinary, but the market was able to adjust because Russian exports continued,” said Chris Lawson, head of fertilisers at CRU, adding that the “big difference” this time was that a blocked Strait of Hormuz was a physical barrier.

The impact on food in 2022 was more immediate because Ukraine was a major wheat exporter, said Patel, but “this time around the impact will be far more widespread”.

The disruption is already affecting production. QatarEnergy, which exported 5.4mn tonnes of urea or close to 10 per cent of global seaborne trade last year, said on Monday it had halted sulphur, ammonia and urea output at its Ras Laffan complex following a drone attack on the site a day earlier. 

Iran had taken all of its ammonia production offline because of the conflict, while producers elsewhere in the region were considering cutting output as vessels are unable to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, said Sarah Marlow, global head of fertiliser pricing at Argus.

Energy prices are also adding pressure. Natural gas is the key feedstock used to produce nitrogen fertilisers such as ammonia and urea, meaning surging gas prices can rapidly raise production costs.

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Holsether said the price of gas used by Yara to produce fertiliser in Europe had doubled from $10.6 per mmbtu on Friday to more than $20 by Monday. 

The disruption is hitting at a particularly sensitive moment for farmers. In parts of Europe and the northern hemisphere, growers are entering the spring fertiliser application season, when they purchase and spread nutrients that determine crop yields later in the year.

“What I’m worried about is, like what we saw in 2022, that it’s the most vulnerable that pay the highest price,” said Holsether. “We saw what that meant — hunger and famine in many parts of the world.”

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Menopausal hormone therapy is free in B.C. and Manitoba. Why not in the rest of Canada? - The Globe and Mail
Thursday March 5th, 2026 at 7:16 PM

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Manulife says only 13.1 per cent of women aged 45 to 65 made a claim for menopausal hormone therapy drugs in 2023.CHRIS WATTIE/Reuters

Earlier this week, on March 1, British Columbia began offering menopausal hormone therapy at no cost.

Manitoba made a similar change, with little fanfare, on April 15, 2025.

So what are the other provinces and territories waiting for?

As B.C. Health Minister Josie Osborne said: “This is a game changer for people who will now be able to access vital medications without worrying about how much they cost.”

The process is simple, too. A woman need only bring her prescription and health card to the pharmacy, and there will be no charge. No registration required, no paperwork, no reimbursement claims.

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Mind you, in a country where there is a crisis in access to primary care, finding a family physician or nurse practitioner to write the prescription for menopausal hormone therapy is a whole other matter.

Most women reach menopause – the stage in a woman’s life when she stops having menstrual periods – between age 45 and 55. Stated another way, the average woman will spend almost half her life in a menopausal state: perimenopause, menopause or postmenopause.

There are more than 30 symptoms associated with the transition to and from menopause, including lack of energy, brain fog, depression, insomnia, night sweats, incontinence, vaginal dryness and more. The drop in estrogen production also increases the risk of cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis.

About one in four suffer severe, often debilitating, symptoms. One in 10 stop working due to unmanaged symptoms.

Far too many suffer in silence, resigned to their fate.

There are more than 10 million women over the age of 40 in Canada. Roughly 2.7 million are aged 40 to 50, when perimenopause symptoms typically begin. Another 2.5 million women are 50 to 60, almost all of whom are in menopause. Another five million are older than 60, and largely postmenopausal.

According to the Menopause Foundation of Canada, three in four women experience symptoms that interfere with their daily lives.

Menopause awareness is growing, but patients still face barriers to evidence-based care

The majority could benefit from symptom relief courtesy of menopausal hormone therapy, but it can be financially out of reach.

“Every woman deserves access to publicly funded menopause care,” says Janet Ko, the foundation’s president and co-founder.

Yet, therapies like estrogen patches, gels and pills can be costly – roughly $240 to $1,800 annually, depending on the severity of symptoms.

As with most prescription drugs, Canadians depend on private insurance for coverage. Only 13.1 per cent of women aged 45 to 65 made a claim for menopausal hormone therapy drugs in 2023, according to the insurer Manulife.

In recent years, the federal government has made modest efforts to expand pharmacare, offering provinces money to cover some diabetes drugs and oral contraceptives.

So far only three provinces and one territory have signed deals with Ottawa. Given that it already publicly covered contraceptives, B.C. decided to use the new money to cover menopausal hormone therapy. Manitoba opted to cover both birth control and MHT.

The timing is good because, in recent years, there has been a resurgence in interest in MHT. In the U.S., prescriptions rose 86 per cent between 2021 and 2025, with rates returning close to what they were in the late 1990s.

There is still a lot of unwarranted fear of menopausal hormone therapy, a lingering effect of a blockbuster 2002 study, the Women’s Health Initiative, that wrongly left the impression MHT increased the risk of cardiovascular disease and breast cancer.

A more careful reading of the data showed that, for most women, the benefits of menopausal hormone therapy greatly outweighed the risks, especially for those under the age of 60.

At the time, 27 per cent of women in the U.S. took MHT, and that number plummeted to 2 per cent. (There is no good data for Canada, but rates are assumed to be roughly similar.)

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Now, perimenopause and menopause are being talked about much more openly and candidly in popular culture, such as TV shows like Baroness von Sketch, and by celebrities like Oprah and Brooke Shields.

In other words, stigma is dissipating, and discussion of symptoms of perimenopause and menopause is more commonplace in the media and in the workplace.

Manulife makes some sound recommendations to employers to better support women experiencing perimenopause and menopause, including normalizing conversation about these common issues, providing autonomy and flexibility in work schedules of employees with symptoms, offering comprehensive drug coverage, training and educating managers, and cultivating a culture of caring.

They’re all suggestions that policy makers and politicians overseeing the publicly funded health care system across the country would also do well to embrace.

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Travel advisory for 32 countries amid polio outbreak | Ned Hamson's Second Line View of the News
Thursday March 5th, 2026 at 6:52 PM

Ned Hamson's Second Line View of the News
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Health officials said anyone (children and adults) heading to these places should be up-to-date on polio vaccines.

Polio, a disease caused by the poliovirus, infects the intestines and throat, according to the Cleveland Clinic. It can lead to flu-like symptoms, brain inflammation, and in severe instances, permanent paralysis.

Source: Travel advisory for 32 countries amid polio outbreak

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sarcozona
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War and pestilence
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