THE NEWS

British police said 12 people have been arrested in an investigation following a weekend crash that killed seven people, including two officers.

South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio agreed to maintain close coordination on North Korea and other alliance issues in a phone call late Monday.

Goldman Sounds Alarm: Europe May Need €100 NatGas Shock To Refill Winter Storage

We have warned that Europe is approaching a twin energy crisis, with the Northern Hemisphere winter now just three months away.

Dutch front-month gas futures, Europe’s benchmark contract, surged Monday morning to 67 euros per megawatt-hour, the highest level since early 2023.

Goldman Sachs commodities expert Samantha Dart warns that EU NatGas prices may need to more than double from her base-case forecast if LNG exports through the Strait of Hormuz remain constrained.

Dart said reduced Qatari LNG loadings have forced Europe to compete more aggressively with Asia for available cargoes.

“We have argued that, in the absence of an improvement in LNG exports through the Strait of Hormuz (SoH) (Exhibit 1), European gas prices (TTF) would need to rise to discourage Asia LNG demand, thereby freeing incremental cargoes to be sent to Europe to help manage European gas storage levels,” she said.

Dart warned that the most alarming scenario would emerge if Persian Gulf energy exports recovered only gradually through 2027. Under that scenario, she estimates December 2026 TTF may need to exceed 100 euros per megawatt-hour, more than double the previous 50-euro base case, while Asian JKM prices could approach $35 per million British thermal units.

She noted, “However, because LNG prices have only been this high once, during the 2022 European energy crisis, our conviction in the scale of demand response at such price levels is low, and we would see it more as a price-discovery process.”

Dart also pointed out that there “hasn’t been enough yet to steady European gas storage injections, with Aug storage injections thus far widening the miss relative to our expectations.”

Current NatGas storage levels for the energy-stricken continent stand at just 61.68%, well below the 15-year seasonal level of 72.5%.

The conflict in the Gulf area has severely constrained LNG flows to Europe, but it is not just the gas market that is constrained. The products market is also under pressure, as evidenced by the worsening diesel crisis.

On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent held a press conference to announce the “single greatest financial offensive ever marshaled against an adversary.”

There was good news over the weekend, as the newly opened, US military-supervised shipping corridor off Oman saw a 400% surge in commercial transits, raising further questions about whether Tehran’s leverage over the Strait of Hormuz has eroded. TotalEnergies’ CEO was quoted early Monday as saying crude is moving through the critical waterway “very quietly.”

Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/25/2026 – 04:15

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries vowed to hold President Donald Trump and his “cartel” accountable while responding to criticism over meeting with Jared Kushner.

Norway Takes Oilfield Climate Battle To Supreme Court

By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com,

The Norwegian government is asking the country’s Supreme Court to overturn lower-court rulings that invalidated the development permits of three new oilfields in Norway’s North Sea.

The case was brought to court three years ago by environmental organizations Greenpeace Nordic and Nature og Ungdom (Nature & Youth). In 2023, the campaigners challenged three administrative decisions of the Norwegian Energy Ministry, which had approved the plan for the development and operation of the oil and gas fields of Breidablikk, Yggdrasil, and Tyrving in the North Sea.

Breidablikk, operated by Equinor, and Yggdrasil, developed and operated by Aker BP, are already producing oil and gas. Tyrving, another Aker BP development, is expected to start up later this year.

The campaigners argued that the environmental assessments and reviews by the Norwegian authorities granted the development and operation licenses without considering the Scope 3 emissions of the customers’ burning of the oil and gas produced at these fields. 

In November 2025, the Norwegian government lost an appeal to have the invalidated licenses overturned. However, the court of appeal allowed production at the two producing fields to continue and gave the state of Norway six months to rectify the shortcomings in the assessment of the plans for field development.   

“The state will argue that the additional assessments of foreign emissions now clearly satisfy all the requirements,” the Office of the Attorney General said, as carried by Reuters, as the Supreme Court begins hearings on the case on Monday.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments for four days until August 27, with the ruling expected later this year.

The Norwegian government is fighting for the new oilfields as it strongly supports the country’s oil and gas industry, a major contributor to GDP and jobs, as well as to the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund with $2.3 trillion in assets.

Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/25/2026 – 03:30

On Aug. 25, 1982, U.S. President Ronald Reagan ordered the deployment of the Marines to Beirut amid the Lebanese Civil War.

Iran Unveils Huge New Gas Discovery Amid US Economic Pressure

Iran announced a huge new gas discovery in the southern province of Fars, with the oil ministry reporting estimates of 7.5 trillion cubic feet of gas, of which 73% is recoverable, or 5.7 trillion cu ft, OilPrice reported.

Iran has the world’s second-largest natural gas reserves, after Russia.

“This amount of gas is equivalent to one block of South Pars, which can supply gas for 15 years,” oil minister Mohsen Paknejad said, as quoted by Iranian media. “This volume of gas has the special characteristic of being sweet, which reduces both development and operating costs,” Paknejad also said.

The Iranian oil ministry also said over the weekend that repairs at the South Pars gas field continue, with 70% of operations now restored. The field was damaged by U.S. and Israeli strikes in the early days of the war. It is the world’s largest gas field, shared by Iran and Qatar, which calls it the North Field and which grew into a top-three world liquefied natural gas exporter thanks to the field’s reserves.

However, restoring 100% of operations at South Pars would take at least three years, the chief executive of the company operating the field told SHANA news agency. He added that “intensive planning and alternative execution methods are being used to bring some trains back online by the end of the year and complete the overall reconstruction within two years.”

The news of the new Iranian discovery comes as the United States threatened to slap more sanctions on Tehran. President Trump called them “draconian”, saying “Well, we have things that we could sanction. We have very draconian sanctions, and we’ll see what happens.”

Separately, in an op-ed for the Financial Times, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent threatened Iran with “an economic D-Day — the single greatest financial offensive ever marshalled against an adversary.” No details about the nature of the sanctions were revealed.

Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/25/2026 – 02:45

Washington’s threat of “economic D-Day” collides with a small group of governments that account for most of what remains of Iran’s foreign trade.

Spain’s Great Replacement: Half Of Unskilled Construction Workers Are Now Foreign Laborers

Via Remix News,

Spain’s construction industry is undergoing rapid demographic changes. Foreign-born workers in unskilled construction roles now make up 52.6 percent of all workers, according to data from Randstad from the first quarter

The data shows that foreign workers now exceed Spanish nationals for these unskilled roles by nearly 11,000 workers. The contrast is stark compared to pre-pandemic figures, when domestic laborers outnumbered foreign counterparts by more than 33,500.

Overall, the construction industry has lost 22,711 Spanish workers since 2019 while gaining 238,451 foreign employees, a figure that includes individuals with dual nationality. As a result, almost 36 percent of all construction workers, both skilled and unskilled, are now of foreign origin in the country.

The shift is equally evident among bricklayers. In 2019, Spanish bricklayers outnumbered foreigners by 111,000. Seven years later, that gap has narrowed to just 18,000 workers. Foreign labor has gained more than 16 percentage points in this category and currently accounts for roughly 48 percent of bricklayers working in Spain. While Spaniards remain the majority in most skilled roles for now, the statistical gap continues to shrink rapidly. Experts also predict that foreigners will increasingly dominate skilled and managerial positions in the future.

This transformation extends into specialized technical trades. The count of Spanish plumbers fell from 70,932 in 2019 to 57,781 today, while foreign representation doubled after adding over 10,000 workers. One in four plumbers in Spain is now foreign-born. Electricians show a similar dynamic, with about 32,000 foreign workers joining the profession since 2019, driving foreign representation up from under 11 percent pre-pandemic to nearly three out of ten today.

Industry analysts expect these patterns to hold due to impending retirements and low replacement rates among younger Spaniards.

Spain, like many other nations, is attempting to automate the construction industry as much as possible. However, instead of relying on advanced robots, Spain has so far shifted toward a modular construction approach in which concrete panels, bathrooms, and complete structural modules are built indoors in automated, factory-controlled settings that use machinery and assembly lines similar to those in the automotive sector. Cranes then assemble these modular components on site, requiring significantly fewer workers and dramatically cutting project delivery times.

Countries such as South Korea, by contrast, are racing ahead in automated construction, precisely because nations like Spain continue to rely on mass immigration, which is often cheaper in the short term but more costly over the long run.

South Korea does not only use automated construction in planning, but also in deploying commercialized robotics, automated modular manufacturing, and government-mandated smart construction.

Automated facilities, such as Space Factory, use advanced robotic arms to cut materials, assemble structural panels, seal joints, and fit window frames without direct manual intervention.

Unlike standard build sites in Spain, South Korean contractors actively deploy field robotics directly to job sites.

Automated rebar-tying robots and robotic concrete sprayers and finishers are routinely used by major developers, such as Samsung C&T and Hyundai E&C, to reduce heavy physical labor on high-rise residential projects. In addition, unmanned excavators and bulldozers guided by real-time GPS and drone mapping handle heavy site preparation.

Robots are even acting as supervisors to some extent, with autonomous quadruped robots, such as Boston Dynamics’ “Spot,” owned by South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Group, continuously patrolling construction sites, performing 3D laser scans to verify that progress matches digital blueprints.

As Remix News has previously reported, automation, robotics, and AI are all leading elements of Asian economies, which have chosen efficiency and technology over mass immigration and cheap foreign labor.

Read more here…

Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/25/2026 – 02:00

Pakistani and Iranian officials have concluded a meeting in Tehran, as Islamabad attempts to resurrect talks between Iran and the United States.