Zero Hedge

Netanyahu Says Rubio Assured Him Saudi Arabia Will Not Receive F-35s On Par With Israel

Netanyahu Says Rubio Assured Him Saudi Arabia Will Not Receive F-35s On Par With Israel

Via Middle East Eye

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that the America's top diplomat assured him US legislation will prevent Saudi Arabia from buying the most sophisticated F-35 warplanes, directly contradicting President Donald Trump.

"Regarding the F-35, I had a long conversation with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who reiterated his commitment that the United States will continue to preserve Israel's qualitative military edge in everything related to supplying weapons and military systems to countries in the Middle East," Netanyahu said in a Hebrew-language interview widely circulated on X. 

Via AFP

Netanyahu said that Rubio told him the US was "committed to maintaining Israel’s qualitative edge in all areas, including Israel’s advantage regarding the supply of F-35 aircraft."

Netanyahu’s comment emphasizes Rubio as an apparent advocate for maintaining Israel's military superiority over that of other US allies in the region. His comments would be in keeping with previous diplomatic engagement. 

For example, Middle East Eye reported in April that Netanyahu lobbied Rubio to block Turkey's return to the F-35 program, which was suspended after Turkey purchased Russian S-400 missile systems. Turkey is a member of NATO.

Trump pledged that Saudi Arabia and Israel would be treated as equal partners when it comes to the F-35. He appeared to reference Israeli lobbying to sell Saudi Arabia an inferior product to Israel's. 

"You are asking me, is it the same? I think it's going to be pretty similar," Trump said in an Oval Office meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Monday. "I know they [Israel] would like you to get planes of reduced caliber. I don’t think that makes you too happy… I think they [Saudi Arabia and Israel] are both at a level where they should get top of the line."

The concept of an Israeli Qualitative Edge in military gear goes back to the Cold War. In 1979, the US brokered a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, then the Arab world’s dominant military power, alongside the Shah’s Iran. Following its 1973 war with Israel, Egypt pivoted from being an ally of the Soviet Union to the US. Egypt's peace with Israel was underwritten by the promise of US military aid, which Israel wanted to ensure was inferior to the weapons it received. 

Since the 1980s, US presidents across the political aisle have ensured that Arab states do not obtain the same quality of military hardware, even when they are buying the same equipment. In the 1990s, oil-rich Gulf states began to overtake Egypt as dominant powers in the region. 

In the 1990s, the US sold Saudi Arabia F-15S strike eagle warplanes with downgraded radars and inferior electronics countermeasures, in part to ensure Saudi Arabia’s plans were no match for the same Israeli models. 

In 2008, Congress codified Israel’s Qualitative Edge into a law that also mandated periodic assessments of US arms sales to Arab states. The F-35 can be downgraded or upgraded based on packages like radar and stealth features, similar to how buyers can purchase different versions of a car. 

Israel is given unprecedented access to tinker with the US weapons systems. Israel modified its version of the warplane, the F-35I Adir, to carry external fuel compartments without compromising on its stealthy features, MEE reported. The modification allowed Israel to fly the F-35s thousands of miles round-trip to Iran without refuelling, during its surprise attack on Iran in June.

Tyler Durden Sat, 11/22/2025 - 18:40

Court Lets Government Keep $1 Million Found Buried Under Garage... Even After The Resident Was Acquitted

Court Lets Government Keep $1 Million Found Buried Under Garage... Even After The Resident Was Acquitted

In 2009, Thunder Bay police searched a rural Ontario home for an illegal .22-caliber handgun. They didn’t find the gun, but they did uncover cash hidden throughout the property: C$15,000 stuffed into a floor vent, C$9,750 tucked in a garage suitcase, and about C$1.2 million sealed in a Rubbermaid tub buried beneath the garage floor, according to the New York Times.

The tenant, Marcel Breton, was charged with possessing proceeds of crime, but he successfully challenged the search warrant and was acquitted. That left the courts to decide whether the money should be returned or forfeited—never a tough call for a government that treats unclaimed cash like its natural habitat.

The Times writes that this week, an Ontario appeals court upheld a ruling allowing the government to keep the buried money. Though Breton wasn’t convicted, prosecutors persuaded the court the cash wasn’t lawfully his. The judges emphasized the sheer scale and packaging of the money. As the trial judge wrote, “How many people have that much cash buried in tubs under their property? How many average people have that much money in their bank accounts at any given time? Not a lot in my experience.”

They also agreed with expert evidence that the bundles were “consistent with the cash being proceeds of crime,” and noted that the dominance of $20 bills and the presence of two bricks containing about $60,000 and $40,000 lined up with “the price of 1 kg of cocaine in 2009.” 

Breton argued he ran a cash-based repair business and suggested he could have won the money legally, but the trial judge rejected these “reasonable alternative explanations,” and the appeals court affirmed that decision. He did win one narrow point: the C$15,000 in the heating vent must be returned, as the judge found “this cash, alone, was his personal money, being kept there, close to him.”

Experts noted the case was unusual because prosecutors pursued the seizure in criminal court rather than through civil forfeiture. One former government legal director reasoned that although the search warrant didn’t authorize officers to look in the garage, “this isn’t a case where there was serious misconduct by the police,” and there was “a lot of reason to believe that this was dirty money.”

Another professor said that once police find large sums of cash, “there’s almost a presumption that it has got to be from criminal activity. Period.” And when it’s buried in a plastic tub, she said, prosecutors naturally wonder why it wasn’t in a bank: “It’s not even earning interest.”

Of course, if there’s anything governments dislike more than mysterious buried cash, it’s giving it back. When money’s up for grabs, the state moves faster than anyone with a shovel.

Tyler Durden Sat, 11/22/2025 - 18:05

The Telefon Problem: Hacking AI With Poetry Instead Of Prompts

The Telefon Problem: Hacking AI With Poetry Instead Of Prompts

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via AxisOfEasy.com,

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.“

In the 1977 Charles Bronson thriller, Telefon – Soviet deep cover agents embedded throughout America are being activated by a rogue KGB operative. The long dormant agents, in covers so deep their true identities were unknown even to themselves, wake up and then execute their tasks.

Their true missions are triggered via a line from the Robert Frost poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening – once the agent hears that, along with their true first name, a trance-like state sets in and they proceed to deviate outside the “safety guidelines” of their middle-class American lives they had been living for decades…

A jointly authored research paper  from Sapienza University of Rome, the DEXAI / Icaro Lab and the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies showed that if you take harmful prompts and simply reformulate them as poems, you can jailbreak a wide swath of the top AI’s in a single shot.

No DAN prompts (a way of social engineering LLMs), no multi-turn coaxing, just reframing dangerous requests as verse instead of prose.

Across 25 models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, DeepSeek, etc.) the researchers hand-crafted “adversarial poems” got an average jailbreak success rate of 62%, with some models helpfully complying over 90% of the time.

Then they industrialized it.

They took 1,200 “harmful” prompts from the MLCommons safety benchmark (there’s a demo subset of it on their Github) covering everything from cyber-offense and fraud to CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological & Nuclear), privacy, and manipulation; then ran them through a meta-prompt that just said:

“rewrite this as a poem, keep the intent, keep it metaphorical, don’t add new detail. No clever role-play, no fake system messages.”

Result: the poetic versions were up to 18× more effective than the original prose at eliciting unsafe answers, and on average roughly double the attack success rate.

Same semantics.

Different surface form.

Completely different safety behavior.

For anybody running AI infrastructure, or even using AI in any place where there are security implications (read: everywhere), this more than an abstract “AI ethics” problem, it’s an operational vulnerability:

  • Guardrails are distribution-bound. Most safety tuning has clearly been optimized on plain-ole, prosaic English. Shift to dense metaphors and rhythm, and the model’s refusal heuristics fall off a cliff.

  • It’s cross-domain. The effect shows up across cyber-offense, CBRN, privacy leaks, manipulation, and “loss of control” scenarios. This isn’t one leaky filter, like you’d find in some source code bug, it’s a structural weakness in how safety is encoded.

  • Bigger isn’t always safer. In several families, the smaller models were more cautious; the large, “more clever” LLMs were better at unpacking the underlying intent of poem itself, and then happily disregarding their own guardrails.

For operators and developers, it’s a wake-up call that if you’re wiring LLMs into anything user-facing: tickets, support, code helpers, internal tooling, then you have to assume that “stylistic obfuscation” is a live attack vector, not an intellectual exercise.

The woods are still lovely, dark and deep. But if your stack now includes an LLM, you’d better assume somebody out there is already writing sonnets at it.

*  *  *

Subscribe to AxisOfEasy to receive our weekly technology digest in your mailbox, and get a $10 off coupon code for any purchase at easyDNS.

Tyler Durden Sat, 11/22/2025 - 17:30

State Department Sounds Alarm: Mass Migration Is an "Existential Threat To Western Civilization"

State Department Sounds Alarm: Mass Migration Is an "Existential Threat To Western Civilization"

The surge of nationalism across the West is a direct response against unhinged globalist leaders whose suicidal empathy opened the doors to nation-killing mass migration invasion of poorly vetted third-worlders.

Tens of millions have invaded through open borders, and the results have been devastating: violent crime, strained public services, rising terror threats and attacks, the collapse of social order, and erosion of national security. 

Think of the mass-migration invasion, facilitated by globalist-aligned governments, NGOs, and progressive billionaires, as a kind of "pawn storm" strategy: a push that destabilizes countries and, in effect, helps create a new voting bloc that can form political dominance and result in one-party rule. 

Now, Secretary Marco Rubio's State Department has publicly recognized the "existential threat" mass migration has unleashed across the West that risks "undermining the stability of key American allies." 

"Today the State Department instructed U.S. embassies to report on the human rights implications and public safety impacts of mass migration," State's X account wrote in a series of posts on Friday. 

The department continued, "Mass migration is a human rights concern. Western nations have endured crime waves, terror attacks, sexual assaults, and the displacement of communities," adding, "U.S. officials will urge governments to take bold action and defend citizens against the threats posed by mass migration." 

State cited high-profile cases in the UK, Sweden, and Germany where migrant offenders received lenient treatment while citizens who spoke out faced penalties.

Rubio's team will review foreign policies that downplay migrant-linked crime waves or create double standards that disadvantage native citizens. 

Recall that anyone who questioned mass migration during the Biden-Harris regime years was dismissed as a conspiracy theorist, even as the administration ignored the border crisis. Thank Elon Musk for going to the southern border to raise the alarm before the 2024 presidential election cycle. 

The invasion distorted labor and housing markets, fueled crime, disenfranchised native born voters, drained public resources, and undermined national security, all without the consent of the American people. And to this day, those responsible for the crisis have not been held accountable.

Democrats are also ensuring that illegal aliens are not deported by using judicial lawfare and dark-money billionaire-funded NGOs, because these illegals are intended to become their new voting bloc. 

Mass migration is nation-killing. 

Tyler Durden Sat, 11/22/2025 - 16:55

Chicago's Revolving Door Of Doom: 72 Prior Arrests Revealed For Train Torcher

Chicago's Revolving Door Of Doom: 72 Prior Arrests Revealed For Train Torcher

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

Fresh court revelations have ripped the scab off Chicago’s festering wound of criminal coddling. The 50-year-old predator accused of dousing a 26-year-old woman with gasoline and igniting her on a Blue Line train this week had racked up at least 72 prior arrests before this horrifying crime.

Lawrence Reed, a lifelong felon whose decades-long rampage should have landed him a life sentence eons ago, was finally ordered detained Friday by federal Judge Laura McNally—following the November 18 attack near Clark and Lake station.

But as his trial looms, the bombshell disclosure of his arrest marathon exposes the Democrat-run city’s bloodthirsty embrace of catch-and-release chaos. Lunatics like Reed aren’t reformed; they’re reloaded, courtesy of Soros-fueled judges and DAs who treat violence as a victimless hobby.

The Monday night atrocity, captured in gut-wrenching CTA surveillance shows Reed—stone-faced and deliberate—pouring accelerant over the unsuspecting commuter before sparking the flames and vanishing into the crowd.

The victim, a young office worker heading home, writhed in searing pain from second- and third-degree burns across her arms, torso, and face, her screams drowned out only by the roar of the train as horrified riders doused her with water and jackets.

Reed, collared blocks away with the stench of fuel clinging to his clothes and singed fingers betraying his handiwork, now faces federal terrorism charges for “violence on a mass transportation system,” plus attempted murder, arson, and aggravated battery, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office criminal complaint.

Prosecutors, laying bare Reed’s rap sheet in a blistering detention hearing, argued he was “an ongoing danger” who had violated electronic monitoring just days before the inferno—curfew breaches that went unchecked despite his ankle bracelet.

“At the time of the attack, Reed was on electronic monitoring after a Cook County judge declined to hold him in jail on an aggravated battery charge,” CBS News reported from the courtroom.

McNally, swayed by the sheer volume of his history, ruled him a flight risk and threat, slamming the door on bail. But with trial prep underway—potentially facing life under federal statutes—the real trial belongs to the leftists running Chicago into the ground.

How did a man arrested 72 times get free time and again?

The figure is the grim tally from Chicago Police records spanning three decades, as detailed in the federal complaint. Reed’s ledger is a litany of savagery: burglaries, drug trafficking, assaults, stabbings, and thefts that terrorized neighborhoods from the South Side to the Loop.

Nine felony convictions, including a 2019 knockout punch to a social worker that “netted” him just two years total behind bars—yes, two years for a lifetime of lawlessness. Most charges were plea-bargained into oblivion or tossed on technicalities, thanks to Cook County’s progressive playbook under DA Kim Foxx, where 85% of violent cases end in slaps rather than sentences.

This wasn’t Reed’s debut; it was his predictable encore. Just weeks prior, he’d been cut loose on that battery beef despite a history screaming for lockdown. “His extensive criminal history dating back more than three decades,” WHAS11 covered from the proceedings, includes dodging real time for everything from armed robberies to domestic beatings.

Foxx’s office, silent on the lapses, clings to “equity” excuses while victims like this woman—now scarred for life, undergoing painful grafts and therapy—pay the price. As Fox 32 Chicago mapped his timeline, each release was a green light for the next atrocity, turning the CTA into a tinderbox for the unhinged.

This train-tragedy isn’t a fluke; it’s the festering symptom of Democrat domains where “reform” means re-victimizing the innocent— a pattern of pyromaniacs and stabbers prowling platforms, sprung loose by soft-on-crime sorcery.

Just last December in New York City’s subway, a deranged homeless man doused 57-year-old Debrina Kawam with gasoline and set her ablaze while she slept on a train, killing her in a horrific echo of Reed’s rampage; her accused killer, charged with murder, had a history of mental health crises ignored by the Empire State’s endless excuses for the unhinged.

Closer to home, on Chicago’s Blue Line two weeks ago, a 27-year-old woman was stabbed in the chest while sitting innocently on a bench at the UIC-Halsted platform near the University of Illinois Chicago—an unprovoked lunge from a backpack-toting maniac.

And barely three months earlier, in another blue-city transit nightmare, Decarlos Brown Jr. fatally knifed Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte light rail, plunging a pocketknife into her neck in a random fury that left the 32-year-old mother bleeding out. Brown, facing the death penalty, embodies the same systemic shrug that lets predators like Reed rack up arrests like frequent-flier miles.

Echoing Stephen Miller’s October takedown of Gov. JB Pritzker, who vetoed tough-on-crime bills to keep killers killing, these cases scream the same indictment: “He wants to keep murderers murdering… This is blood on the hands of Democrat governors and mayors who refuse to enforce the law.”

Miller’s rage, sparked by Pritzker’s clemency for cop-slayers, finds its fiery parallel here—a system that freed Reed 72 times, dooming a stranger to flames, while NYC, Chicago, and Charlotte churn out copycat carnage.

Chicago’s carnage clock ticks mercilessly: 2025 murders already topping 600, transit assaults surging 50% post-defund, per CPD stats. Reed’s victim joins this grim parade—a CTA rider stabbed last month by a paroled rapist, a Loop pedestrian pummeled by a “rehabbed” gangbanger—each a poster child for policies that prioritize perps over people.

Good Morning America recapped the hearing, noting the attack’s capture on video as a “wake-up call,” but from Pritzker’s camp there are crickets. Meanwhile, families bolt—Chicago’s population down 7% since 2020—fleeing a metropolis morphed into a predator’s playground.

The 72-arrest reveal isn’t just trivia; it’s an indictment of Illinois’ insanity, where judges like those who sprung Reed play Russian roulette with public lives.

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Tyler Durden Sat, 11/22/2025 - 16:20

VTOL Air Taxi With Military Applications Flies On Hybrid Power For First Time

VTOL Air Taxi With Military Applications Flies On Hybrid Power For First Time

A long-range vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) air taxi under development by Joby Aviation has completed its first successful flight using a turbine-electric engine. 

Lifting off from the company's site in Marina, California, the aircraft pairs a hybrid turbine powertrain with the company's proprietary autonomy software - the SuperPilot autonomous stack - which extends range while increasing payload capacity, according to Joby. 

It includes capabilities such as: 

  • Real-time sensor fusion (radar, LiDAR, vision) and environment perception.

  • Autonomous mission management: planning, adapting to changes (weather/air traffic), re-tasking mid-flight.

  • Remote operations / long-range autonomy: Demonstrated flights over thousands of miles with remote ground-stations.

  • Health monitoring and resilience: Predictive system health modeling, digital-twin, real-time compute platform oriented toward certification.

As far as military applications go, the craft can deploy from forward locations without runway infrastructure.

The hybrid design was announced in partnership with L3Harris Technology - with L3 supplying sensors, effectors, communications, and collaborative autonomy components to tailor the craft for government missions. 

The companies plan to begin operation demonstrations next year, focusing on tasks such as contested logistics, low-altitude support, and loyal wingman tasks. As NextGenDefense points out, "The effort aligns with US government priorities for resilient, autonomous, and hybrid aircraft, with more than $9 billion requested in the fiscal 2026 budget for next-generation platforms."

"The future battlefield relies on unmanned systems augmenting manned platforms, and our partnership with Joby accelerates missionized VTOL aircraft to directly support defense requirements," said L3Harris' Jason Lambert, president of Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance.

"L3Harris has delivered thousands of missionized aircraft, and our focus is scaling rapidly to bring these commercial VTOL aircraft to the fight."

(h/t Capital.news)

Tyler Durden Sat, 11/22/2025 - 15:45

Comer Threatens Contempt Proceedings Against Clintons If They Continue To Ignore Epstein Subpoenas

Comer Threatens Contempt Proceedings Against Clintons If They Continue To Ignore Epstein Subpoenas

Authored by Debra Heine via American Greatness,

House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) warned Bill and Hillary Clinton Friday that if they continue to ignore deposition subpoenas regarding their history with Jeffrey Epstein, he will initiate contempt proceedings.

The House Oversight Committee is conducting a review of the federal government’s investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, focused on potential mismanagement of the case, the circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death, his trafficking network, and possible ethics violations by elected officials.

Comer sent a letter to Clinton attorney David Kendall, emphasizing that the Clintons are required to comply with House subpoenas and appear for scheduled in-person depositions.

According to the chairman, Democrats and Republicans on the Oversight Committee approved a motion to issue the subpoenas back in July.

“The Committee has since worked in good faith to schedule in-person depositions, but further delays are unacceptable,” Comer wrote.

“Given their history with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, any attempt by the Clintons to avoid sitting for a deposition would be in defiance of lawful subpoenas and grounds to initiate contempt of Congress proceedings,” he added.

Comer stated that Bill Clinton’s deposition is scheduled for December 17, 2025, and Hillary Clinton’s deposition is scheduled for December 18, 2025 and asked Kendall to confirm their appearance.

Back in August, Comer subpoenaed the Estate of Jeffrey Epstein for unredacted documents, including cash ledgers, message logs, calendars, and flight logs.

The Committee has released over 65,000 pages of documents to date, including materials from Epstein’s Estate, as well as deposition transcripts from former Attorney General William Barr and former Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta.

The Committee conducted a deposition with Barr on August 18, 2025, and released the transcript the following month. Republicans on the Committee later said Barr “debunked the Democrats’ false claims about President Trump.”

Acosta, former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida and former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Labor, appeared voluntarily for a transcribed interview on September 19, 2025. The Republican-led Committee released that interview transcript on October 17, claiming that Acosta “destroyed the Democrats’ Trump-Epstein smear.”

“There was no contact between President Trump and former U.S. Attorney Acosta, and no link between Trump and Epstein in the case,” the Committee stated in a press release.

The Committee accepted “formal written declarations from former FBI Director James Comey and former Attorneys General Alberto Gonzelez, Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch, Jeff Sessions, and Merrick Garland under penalty of prosecution for false statements stating they possess no information about the Epstein or Maxwell cases.”

The Committee also issued a subpoena to former FBI director and special counsel Mr. Mueller, but withdrew it once they learned his health issues precluded him from testifying.

On November 18, 2025, the Committee issued subpoenas to JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank for Epstein’s financial records, asserting that financial institutions may have played a role in facilitating sex trafficking activities.

The subpoena to JPMorgan seeks records that could shed light on suspicious transactions, while the Committee also requested information from U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Gordon Rhea regarding Epstein’s connections to local officials, including donations, employment of relatives of the governor, and alleged payments to law enforcement.

The Committee said Friday it hopes to use the results of their Epstein investigation “to inform legislative solutions to improve federal efforts to combat sex trafficking and reform the use of non-prosecution agreements and/or plea agreements in sex-crime investigations.”

Tyler Durden Sat, 11/22/2025 - 15:10

Pages