THE NEWS

A special counsel team has determined former President Yoon Suk Yeol had prepared to declare martial law since late 2023, about a year before his failed bid in December 2024, officials said Monday.

South Korean stocks extended a rally to a fresh all-time high Monday, driven by strong gains in stocks related to artificial intelligence.

Five workers were killed and two others injured Monday after an explosion and fire at a Hanwha Aerospace defense facility in Daejeon, officials said.

As a physician, former member of Congress, and former secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I have spent much of my career focused on policies that improve health outcomes. I have also seen the toll of smoking up close. I lost my father to what I often call “Lucky Strike lungs.” That experience has stayed with me — and it underscores a simple fact: smoking remains one of the nation’s most serious and persistent public health challenges.Yet in Washington, there is a growing habit of talking about smoking as if it were yesterday’s problem. It is not. Roughly 25 million American adults still smoke cigarettes, and far too many have been left out of the public health conversation. That is the central message of “The Forgotten Smoker,” a new white paper from Philip Morris International U.S. (PMI U.S.) that urges policymakers to confront a reality they too often overlook: progress has stalled for millions of Americans still at greatest risk.From a physician’s perspective, these Americans are not abstractions. They are patients, parents, workers, veterans and neighbors. Many have tried to quit more than once. Many know the risks all too well. But understanding the danger and overcoming addiction are not the same thing. If we are serious about reducing smoking-related disease, our policies must reflect the lived reality of adults who continue to smoke instead of assuming the problem will solve itself.A more effective approach starts with a straightforward public health principle: the greatest harm comes from combustion. The FDA has recognized that tobacco and nicotine products exist on a continuum of risk, with cigarettes at the most dangerous end and smoke-free alternatives generally posing lower health risks than continued smoking. That matters. For adults who do not quit nicotine entirely, moving away from cigarettes can still be a meaningful health intervention.CIGARETTE SMOKING IN AMERICA PLUMMETS TO HISTORIC SINGLE-DIGIT LOW, NEW STUDY FINDSUnfortunately, that message is still not reaching the people who need it most. The FDA can make real progress by authorizing smoke-free products through its rigorous scientific review process, but that progress means little if patients never hear about it — or if their clinicians do not feel prepared to discuss it accurately. As a physician, I find that especially troubling. Regulatory action matters, but communication is what turns regulatory action into public health impact.We can see the consequences in the data. A national survey of 1,565 U.S. healthcare practitioners commissioned by PMI U.S. and fielded by Povaddo LLC found that 47% mistakenly believe nicotine is a carcinogen, while another 19% are unsure. The fact is, nicotine itself does not directly cause cancer.The same survey found that 69% want the FDA to share clinical evidence on the role smoke-free products can play in harm reduction, 68% want clear guidance on counseling patients who want to move away from cigarettes, and 95% say they would share FDA-provided information with patients. That is not a marginal finding. It is a clear signal that clinicians want credible, practical tools — and that the FDA is uniquely positioned to provide them.DISPOSABLE VAPES MORE TOXIC AND CARCINOGENIC THAN CIGARETTES, STUDY SHOWSThat confusion does not stop at the clinic door. “The Forgotten Smoker” research found that misinformation about nicotine and relative risk is widespread: 52% of Americans incorrectly believe nicotine itself causes cancer, and 73% mistakenly believe all tobacco and nicotine products are equally harmful.CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINIONYet the public also understands there is unfinished work. When presented with the scale of continued smoking, 79% say more should be done to reduce smoking-related harm. In Washington, that should be seen for what it is: both a warning and an opening to act.What should happen next is fairly straightforward. The FDA should equip clinicians with practical, plain-language guidance they can use now — materials developed with input from practicing physicians that explain what the agency has authorized, what that authorization does and does not mean, and how to have evidence-based conversations with adult smokers trying to move away from cigarettes.It should say plainly and repeatedly what drives the greatest health risk: smoke, not nicotine. It should make authorization decisions understandable to non-experts and bring that science into exam rooms, where patient decisions are often shaped. And it should speak directly to adult smokers in ways that meet them where they are, especially populations that remain overrepresented among those who continue to smoke, including older Americans and veterans.Good public health policy meets people where they are, uses the best available evidence, and gives both patients and clinicians the tools to act. The forgotten smoker has been overlooked for too long. Washington should stop looking away.CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM DR. TOM PRICE

The way to solve the Middle East problem is to leave the Middle East problem. From the madness, a pattern is emerging: barrels are being rounded up in the Americas and the United States is quietly assembling the pieces of a new energy isolationism.It started with “Drill, Baby, Drill,” the long-in-the-tooth bit of campaign rhetoric. Then came the January 2025 National Energy Emergency proclamation. Then the Big Beautiful Bill and rolled-back regs for oil and gas producers and consumers. Then Venezuela and its enormous reserves. And now the lessons of playing with fire in the Strait of Hormuz. The collective result is a reshuffling of U.S. energy access.”Let them all do it. What the hell are we doing it for?” President Donald Trump recently declared, suggesting Europe, China, Korea and Japan should be the ones to open and police the Strait of Hormuz. “We will be helpful, but they should take the lead in protecting the oil they so desperately depend on.” Whatever one’s regard for Trump, the argument that the U.S. goes it alone might just be a reasonable one.Oil markets are a confusing network of alliances, logistics, seaborne routes, pipelines and refining needs. But in the simplest terms: the U.S. consumes 20 million barrels of crude per day and produces 13.6 million. Analysts will say we’re energy independent, but that’s a BTU calculation, not actual barrels. We need more physical barrels to make up the difference, and we’re almost there.STEVE MOORE: FIVE ENERGY TRUTHS THE MEDIA IGNORE AS AMERICA’S OIL BOOM BLUNTS THE IRAN WAR’S IMPACTCanada exports 4.0 million barrels per day to the U.S., Mexico adds 0.3 million, and Venezuela adds 0.44 million. Combined, that’s 18 million barrels a day. As Venezuelan exports rise with the work Energy Secretary Chris Wright is doing there, and Mexican exports return to historic norms, with newly favorable federal leasing in Alaska, the Lower 48, and the offshore Gulf, we’re knocking on the door of actual rather than rhetorical energy independence. Tier One shale acreage may be disappearing, but drilling efficiencies continue to improve, and there’s no shortage of BTU-rich natural gas liquids coming out of the major basins.There are two wild cards: California and New York. Both are oil- and gas-rich, yet, both irrationally flawed in their use-it-but-don’t-produce-it mantra. Stuck in their cognitive dissonance, where they trade policy for poverty, maybe the day will come when ideology finally gets traded in for pragmatism.Rub #1: The floor on oil price profitability isn’t the $50s or $60s per barrel, as pushed by the Trump administration. It’s in the middle to upper $70s. No amount of regulation-off or cutting unnecessary regulations can fix that.TRUMP FLOATS A GAS TAX HOLIDAYRub #2: Trump and Chris Wright term out in January 2029. Should another pairing like former President Joe Biden and former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm take place, the gains made will likely be repealed, canceled, or litigated, as happened with Biden’s illegal suspension of federal lease sales on Day One of his administration. That was Day One of the war on fossil fuels. Don’t think it’s not coming again.Given that much of the production in Western states is on federal acreage, a hard left turn in policy will tank the energy independence we’re building toward. A second push into renewables won’t add the energy we need, surely not with the coming strain of data center demands.CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINIONThe left doesn’t see energy as an all-of-the-above choice, as it needs to be. It agitates against fossil fuels, which, aside from nuclear, are the only means of universal efficiency. Should another Biden take charge, the renewal of state-sponsored climate activism will return us to the same Middle East mayhem we now have a chance to leave behind.Trump and his secretaries are running out of time. Accomplishing true U.S. energy independence has to be done now — meaning more leasing on federal lands and water, a higher rig count, and completing proposed pipelines and refinery expansions. Politicizing low oil prices, as Trump is prone to do, won’t get us there.Reasonable oil prices are neither inflationary nor recessionary. The damage comes when prices go too low, as they were earlier this year, or too high, as they are now. As both the owner of a fracking company and an oil and gas production company, I’ll take the middle every time. Reg-off is good, but it’s negligible compared to necessary prices.The window is open. It won’t stay that way.CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM DAN DOYLE

If you drive a hybrid or an electric vehicle (EV), fly on a modern jet, or expect American weapons to hit their targets, you owe thanks to a small group of elements known as heavy rare earths. For more than a decade, China has been the world’s near-sole supplier. Last year, Beijing shut that door to Western defense companies.Here is my prediction: it is not going to reopen for any industry in the West.Some Western leaders keep treating each new Chinese export restriction as a bargaining chip — leverage to be traded for the right concession at the right summit. That is the wrong way to read what is happening. China is methodically executing a long-term economic and military plan to stop shipping these materials abroad altogether. It intends to send us Chinese-made EVs, wind turbines and robots built with dysprosium and terbium — not the oxides themselves.Who would blame them? Keeping the entire mine-to-magnet-to-manufacturer chain inside China preserves jobs and stability at every link. For the Chinese Communist Party, maximizing employment and minimizing internal dissent is Job No. 1. Denying Western militaries the inputs they would need in a fight over Taiwan, for example, is an added bonus to Beijing.THE CCP CONTROLS THE MOST INTIMATE ELEMENTS OF OUR LIFE. MOST AMERICANS HAVE NO IDEAThe economic logic is the part Western policymakers need to internalize most. A kilogram of dysprosium shipped abroad as a powder earns China a few hundred dollars and employs a handful of miners. The same kilogram, tucked inside the motor of an electric car, helps roll a $40,000 vehicle off a Chinese assembly line.It also employs millions of Chinese workers, from the mine to the smelter to the magnet plant to the auto factory. Multiply that across the seven million vehicles China will export this year, plus its wind turbines, drones, MRI machines and industrial robots, and the choice writes itself. Beijing said as much, out loud, in its Made in China 2025 blueprint: capture the full chain, from rock to robot.Markets are responding rationally to that strategy. Earlier this month, dysprosium oxide sold in China for about $270 a kilogram. In Europe, the same material fetched $1,100 — more than four times as much. Terbium showed the same pattern: $1,145 per kilogram in China versus $4,250 in Europe. Last fall, Beijing quietly cut off terbium sales to private investors, so its own factories could get first call. That is not how an exporter behaves. That is how a country hoarding a scarce resource for itself behaves.TEXAS RARE-EARTH PROJECT AIMS TO CURB US RELIANCE ON CHINA, STRENGTHEN NATIONAL SECURITYThe quiet truth is that China is running short of the heavy rare earths it once had in abundance. Despite holding roughly a third of the world’s total rare earth reserves, its deposits of the heavy varieties — the ones that make high-performance magnets work — have been thinning for more than a decade.To cover the gap, China has been relying on imports from war-torn Myanmar, and even those mines are starting to fade. Every kilogram of dysprosium Beijing ships overseas comes from a shrinking pile.The strategic stakes follow directly from the chemistry. A pinch of dysprosium or terbium, often less than 1% by weight, when alloyed into the permanent magnets that spin inside an EV motor, allows the magnets to withstand engine heat without losing strength. The same magnets steer cruise missiles, point fighter-jet radars and drive the silent propulsion in America’s submarines. Without these two elements, modern weapons and nearly every EV on the road either degrade or simply stop working.CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINIONChina is not weaponizing rare earths to punish the West. It is doing something colder and more durable: deciding that selling raw materials is bad business. The licensing rules, the extraterritorial reach and the on-again, off-again suspensions — these are not random skirmishes. They are the dial Beijing is slowly turning down on raw exports while it turns the other dial up on finished goods made from the same atoms.President Donald Trump clearly sees where this is headed. His administration is working furiously to develop mine-to-manufacturer supply chains in the U.S., including the Pentagon’s early investments in the domestic scandium supply chain. Europe must accelerate its efforts along the same lines.Any plan that assumes we will continue to receive Chinese heavy rare earths — even with a permit stamp — is built on a supply that basic economics says will shrink until it disappears. The Pentagon’s 2027 ban on Chinese magnets in American weapons systems and the surge of new mine-and-magnet projects on both sides of the Atlantic are not protectionism. They are a late but necessary admission that the world’s most important supply chain is being deliberately pulled out from under us.The only question left is whether the West will build its own supply chains in time — or keep waiting for an opening that Beijing has every reason to keep shut.CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM MARK A. SMITH

German School Forces Teens To Design ‘Inclusive Brothel’

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

Parents across Germany are in uproar after a Catholic high school handed 13- to 15-year-olds the grotesque task of modernizing a brothel to make it “sexually inclusive” for every lifestyle and preference under the sun.

The assignment at Cardinal von Galen Gymnasium in Kevelaer, North Rhine-Westphalia, formed part of a “Sexual Education of Diversity” module. 

Students were told to simulate running an existing brothel in a big city, with a fixed floor plan they could only tweak by adding doors and staircases. 

Insane pic.twitter.com/hFYy379mQV
— Basil the Great (@BasilTheGreat) May 29, 2026
They had to detail which sexual preferences the spaces must cater to, what “services” to offer, target groups, advertising, and crucially “what skills and abilities” the workers would need “so that all kinds of people could be served and satisfied.”

In what world is it OK to ask children to do this?

The workbook, titled “Puff für alle” – slang for “Brothel for All” – framed the exercise as responding to “developments in our society with a diversity of lifestyles and gender roles.”

Headmistress Christina Diehr defended the material to WDR, stating it was “deliberately designed to be provocative in order to stimulate discussion.” 

She added that it “addresses the heavy use of social media channels by children and young people and the associated flood of information about various forms of sexuality.”

After the worksheets leaked and sparked widespread fury on social media, the school held what it called “constructive” talks with parents, the teacher, and the class parents’ committee. 

Officials confirmed they will not re-issue the assignment and are now preparing alternative lessons on “diversity of lifestyles and sexuality.”

One older student pushed back sharply in comments to WDR: “People should be questioning the acceptance surrounding the topic of sex work… 95 percent of all sex workers being women, and a significant number of them being girls, I believe it’s inappropriate to address brothels in sex education and, above all, to fail to differentiate and explore the topic in an assignment.”

This sanitized, taxpayer-funded fantasy of “inclusive” prostitution arrives at the exact moment German schools and kindergartens are reeling from real-world sexual horrors inflicted by migrants who never should have been let near children.

As we previously highlighted, an 18-year-old Afghan asylum seeker intern at Brehm School in Düsseldorf allegedly dropped his trousers and exposed his erect penis to two second-grade girls while a teacher was present in the room. 

He had also groped the class teacher’s buttocks days before. The intern admitted the groping to police. The school only banned him after the girls’ parents raised the alarm themselves, and authorities noted schools often try to “keep a low profile” on such crimes.

In a separate case, a 35-year-old Syrian intern molested two four-year-olds in a Neubrandenburg kindergarten – touching a sleeping girl’s genitals and buttocks with sexual intent, then assaulting a boy who reported it to his parents. Kindergarten staff initially handled the first incident internally without calling police.

German schools are descending into chaos precisely because of mass migration. One report detailed entire institutions “dealing with hell” from violence, language barriers, and cultural clashes driven by unchecked inflows. 

Another school required permanent police guards after 118 crimes in a single year, including knife attacks and threats. 

Parents have pulled kids from daycare out of fear of neighboring asylum centers, while in some towns planned kindergartens were quietly converted into asylum housing instead.

Globalist policies have flooded communities with unvetted individuals from incompatible cultures while authorities sexualize and confuse native children with literal brothel-planning homework. 

Innocence is stripped on two fronts: ideological grooming in the curriculum and physical predation enabled by open borders.

Germany’s leaders have chosen experiments in “diversity” over the basic duty to protect the young. The result is traumatized kids, furious parents, and a system that lectures about inclusion while failing to deliver safety.

This cannot continue. Only nations that secure their borders, prioritize their own citizens, and reject both woke indoctrination and demographic replacement will spare their children this nightmare.

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Tyler Durden
Mon, 06/01/2026 – 05:00

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the Israeli military to attack the southern Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh early Monday.

How The FIFA World Cup Affects Short-Term Rental Markets

For international football fans traveling to North America to attend the FIFA World Cup this summer, the costs of doing so quickly add up.

As Statista’s Felix Richter details below, between flights, accommodation, food, local transportation and tickets, a week-long trip to the tournament can easily set you back a couple of thousand dollars, which is why FIFA and local businesses in the United States have been accused of price gouging in the run-up to the multi-week event.

Fans put off by sky-high hotel prices in host cities may look elsewhere for cheaper accommodation, but the short-term rental market, i.e. Airbnb and similar platforms, is also heating up in anticipation of the World Cup and millions of international visitors. According to AirDNA, an analytics platform for the short-term rental industry, demand for short-term rentals has surged in many host cities, with Guadalajara, Mexico City and Monterrey seeing particularly large spikes in bookings and nightly rates.

You will find more infographics at Statista

On group stage matchdays, the number of bookings in the three Mexican host cities rose by an average of 186 percent compared to the previous year, while the average nightly rate increased by 72 percent year-over-year.

Host cities in the U.S. and Canada have seen significantly smaller increases in demand and prices, indicating that baseline demand in these cities is higher compared to their Mexican counterparts.

For those still looking for accommodation, however, the report brings mixed news.

On the one hand, the average price increase for listings that were still available as of May 28 was roughly twice as high as the increase for bookings that had already been made.

On the other hand, with vacancy rates indicating that there are still plenty of options on the market and hoteliers reporting that demand has fallen short of expectations, last-minute bookers may still benefit from falling prices in the days leading up to the World Cup kickoff on June 11.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 06/01/2026 – 04:15

The United States and Iran said they traded attacks late Sunday, with each side claiming to have hit military targets, the latest tit-for-tat strikes amid a brittling cease-fire.