Sunday, July 5, 2026

Red Sea Blockage Fears: Cargo Ship Attacked Off Southwest Yemen...this is the Islamists war on the infidel

Red Sea Blockage Fears: Cargo Ship Attacked Off Southwest Yemen

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/red-sea-blockage-fears-cargo-ship-attacked-southwest-yemen

A Red Sea disruption would be terrible timing for global shipping and energy markets, coming just as vessel traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has started to normalize in recent weeks.

An overnight report that a cargo ship was attacked by "armed assailants" in the southern Red Sea off Yemen is a reminder that the region's maritime-risk premium has not totally disappeared; it has simply shifted chokepoints.

"UKMTO has received a report of an incident 30NM southwest of Al Hudaydah, Yemen. A cargo vessel has triggered a distress alert stating that they are under attack by unknown armed assailants," the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations wrote in an alert published on X early Sunday morning.

If the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the southern gateway of the Red Sea that sits between Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula, begins flashing red again, the Suez-Red Sea maritime trade route could quickly become a major headache for global shipping companies, forcing more vessels around the Cape of Good Hope and reigniting pressure on freight rates, insurance costs, and energy-linked supply chains - thus fueling inflation.

Nomura's Chief Economist for India and Asia ex-Japan, Sonal Varma, recently outlined for clients the critical importance of the Red Sea:

Since the Houthi attacks in 2023, global trade via the Red Sea has fallen, but the Bal el-Mandeb Strait and Suez Canal still account for 9% of global maritime traffic, ~20% of global container traffic and ~8.7% of world oil supply (including the SUMED pipeline). The Cape of Good Hope is an alternative route that will be used, but it involves longer transit times, higher fuel costs and increased freight rates.

Why this matters for Asia:

Most of the crude oil and condensate shipped via the Red Sea is destined for Asia (~68% of total), especially India. Around 40% of Asia-Europe trade transited through the Suez Canal in early 2024, including manufactured goods (electronics, vehicles and textiles), intermediate inputs for supply chains (auto and electronic components) and agricultural products (wheat, rice, sugar and tea).

Implications for Asia:

With the Strait of Hormuz blocked, Red Sea disruptions would aggravate the supply crunch. The cost of oil and petroleum product imports would rise for the region overall, with a higher burden for India, owing to its dependence on Russian oil via the Suez Canal. Asia's exports to Europe could also be adversely affected, due to higher freight costs and longer transit times. The dependence of the European auto industry on component imports from Asia would also likely impact the auto sector.

Latest Gulf area news (courtesy of Bloomberg):

Khamenei Funeral Proceedings

• Iran began a mass funeral for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday, July 4, with his body lying in state at Tehran's Imam Khomeini Mosalla mosque complex for public visits over the weekend

• Tens of thousands of mourners streamed to the Grand Mosalla religious complex in Tehran on Saturday to view the caskets of Khamenei and some of his family members

• Iranian authorities predict up to 20 million people will turn out over six days of funeral ceremonies beginning Saturday

• Khamenei's coffin, wrapped in an Iranian flag, was placed on a platform alongside the coffins of family members killed in the same US-Israeli attack on February 28

Khamenei's Death and War Context

• Khamenei, who ruled over Iran for 37 years, was killed along with several family members in a US and Israeli airstrike on the first day of the war in late February

• Iran feared it was too dangerous to hold funeral rites for four months, but is now proceeding shielded by a tentative truce and an America distracted by its 250th July Fourth celebration

Post-War Political Landscape

• Iran's new leadership is described as younger, savvier, ruthless and even more hard-line, contradicting Trump's claim of accomplishing "regime change"

• After surviving months of strikes by the US and Israel, the Iranian regime has emerged emboldened

Hormuz Tensions

• At least eight ships attempting to leave the Persian Gulf along the Omani coast turned back between Friday and Saturday, with some switching to a route closer to Iran

• The number of vessels sailing through the Strait of Hormuz along the Omani coast fell to a trickle on Sunday, after several made sharp reversals on Saturday

• Iran's ambassador to Beijing said China and other friendly nations will be granted 'special considerations' when Tehran determines service fees for ships using the Strait of Hormuz

• Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister warned the UK and France against meddling in the Strait of Hormuz, stating it is not a military playground for extra-regional powers

International Naval Presence

• French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle will return to its home port in Toulon after a nearly two-month deployment near the Strait of Hormuz, while mine countermeasure assets will remain deployed

Oil Market

• Major OPEC+ members agreed on Sunday to add 188,000 barrels a day to their output target for next month, adding to the prospect of more supply if a US-Iran peace pact can stick

• Flows of oil and natural gas have been returning to normal and prices have tumbled since an interim US-Iran accord was signed last month that pried open the Strait of Hormuz

Did you think these greedy socialists would stop at billionaires...we are in an existential war with the takers

First $1 Billion, Now $50 Million: Khanna Says Wealth Tax "Must Not Stop At Billionaires"

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/first-1-billion-now-50-million-khanna-says-wealth-tax-must-not-stop-billionaires

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) - fresh off endorsing California's November ballot measure to seize 5% of billionaire wealth - published a Substack essay Wednesday titled, no really, "Why I Support a Billionaire Wealth Tax."

He makes it roughly a dozen paragraphs before explaining that it isn't one.

"The tax should not stop at billionaires, it must reach centimillionaires," Khanna writes, before spelling out exactly what that means: every fortune of $50 million and up, hit with a 2% federal levy on wealth above that line - every year, forever, on top of everything else you already pay. The vehicle is Elizabeth Warren's Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, which Khanna notes he has cosponsored every single year it's been introduced.

And before anyone reaches for the estate planner: Khanna wants the levy to pierce irrevocable trusts, with the tax billed to the grantor who set them up - because parking a fortune in a trust, in his telling, shouldn't take it off the government's books.

Former Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky summed up the reveal in eight words: "Just like that, no longer a billionaires tax."

Pirate Wires' Mike Solana was less diplomatic, characterizing the scheme as an annual asset seizure in which the government tallies everything you own and demands a cut on top of your existing tax bill - now openly targeting anyone worth $50 million. His prediction for where the ratchet stops: "this ends with your 401k."

For those keeping score at home, the threshold discourse has traveled a long way in a short time:

The measure headed to California voters in November is a one-time 5% tax on the state's roughly 250 billionaires.Newsom, opposing it, countered on June 26 with a national "billionaires' tax" - which, in its original form, applied to anyone worth $100 million or more, language that was quietly scrubbed after multiple outlets quoted it as we reported. Six days later, Khanna planted the flag at $50 million.

None of this is exactly new, of course. The Warren bill has carried the $50 million line since she rolled it out in 2019, and Biden's 2022 "Billionaire Minimum Income Tax" kicked in at $100 million households. The branding always says billionaire, but the fine print ios a slippery slope.

Then there's inflation... The bill's $50 million threshold is a flat statutory number that hasn't moved since 2019 - meaning inflation has already quietly cut the real threshold by more than a fifth. The creep shows up in the sponsors' own math: when the bill debuted, backers said it touched the top 0.05% of American households; the 2026 reintroduction, per the same Saez-Zucman analysis the sponsors tout, now reaches 260,000 households - the top 0.15%. Same words, triple the coverage, five years. Asset inflation does the broadening automatically. Congress just has to sit still.

The escalator, meanwhile, is pre-drafted: buried in the bill is a provision doubling the top rate to 6% automatically in any year that qualifying trigger legislation is on the books.

And anyone curious where a "normalized" wealth tax eventually settles can consult the countries that already normalized one. Norway's kicks in around $160,000 of net worth. The Netherlands taxes deemed returns on assets above roughly €57,000. Swiss cantons start in the low six figures. The European wealth taxes that stayed rich-only - France, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Denmark - were repealed as revenue duds. The ones that survived did so by reaching the middle class. The slippery slope is quite literally the only way these things 'work.'

Khanna spends a portion of the essay taking intramural shots at Newsom, dismissing the governor's version as an income tax billionaires will never feel - since they take no salary, borrow against their stock, and pass fortunes to their kids without selling a share - while boasting that he and Bernie Sanders tax the wealth itself, to the tune of a claimed $4.4 trillion.

The replies were not kind. Christopher Rufo suggested Washington recover the estimated half-trillion dollars a year lost to fraud before inventing new revenue streams. The most-liked response, from James Hafner, noted that the essay's "philosophical case" never actually argues its one load-bearing premise - that one man's need constitutes a claim on another man's property. "There is arithmetic, and there is need," Hafner wrote of the piece's actual contents.

Khanna's comeback - asking Hafner what he thinks of property taxes - was promptly ratioed, sitting at 135 replies to 11 likes at press time.

Except - property taxes are local, visible, and appealable; they pay for the pothole crew, the 2 a.m. patrol car, and the school down the street - and when assessments outran paychecks, voters famously revolted and capped them. Khanna's essay actually frames the California fight as Proposition 13 in reverse, which is a remarkable self-own: he's marketing the sequel to a movie that ended in a taxpayer revolt, triggered by precisely the dynamic critics warn about - paper valuations rising faster than the cash available to pay the levy.

The federal version offers none of the offsetting virtues. The Ultra-Millionaire Tax deposits into the general fund; the child-care-and-community-college wish list lives in the press release, not the bill text. What the bill text does contain is enforcement - just not of the spending. It orders the IRS to audit at least 30% of everyone subject to the tax, every single year. It hands the agency expanded authority to assign values to private businesses, farmland, art, and anything else that's hard to price. It wires in FATCA-style third-party reporting. And should you decide you've had enough of the annual appraisal and leave, it imposes a 40% exit tax on net worth above $50 million on your way out the door. In other words: relentless annual oversight of the taxpayers, and none whatsoever of where the money goes. Even Khanna seems to grasp the trust problem - he launched a state-fraud probe in December, conceding taxpayers "need to have a receipt" for what their money funds - which rather makes Rufo's point: by his own estimate Washington loses half a trillion a year to fraud, and the remedy on offer is an audit of your art collection.

All of which lands a little awkwardly next to this week's Free Beacon report detailing how Khanna's own family fortune - courtesy of centimillionaire father-in-law and auto-parts magnate Monte Ahuja - is sheltered through the very sort of irrevocable trusts the congressman now wants taxed to the grantor. Per the Beacon, Khanna's minor children hold trust stakes in three private golf clubs and multiple hedge funds, the family occupies a $6 million, marble-clad Washington home with a private elevator, and the congressman's financial disclosures run to 333 pages of conveniently non-searchable tables.

What it does say, in writing, is what the fine print has said all along: the number was never $1 billion. This week it's $50 million. Ask again next cycle.

George Soros producer of nothing but evil

George Soros and family buy 18 plots of land in exclusive Hamptons enclave, squeezing locals: ‘Ruining the island’

SHELTER ISLAND, NY — George Soros and his family have been on a property buying spree, scooping up homes and prime parcels of land in an idyllic Hamptons enclave, angering local residents who worry the billionaire land grab is already upending the tight-knit community, The Post has learned.

The family now control nearly 120 acres of property on Shelter Island, which is only accessible by ferry, making the Soroses — billionaire Hungarian-American investor George, 95, his sons Alex, 40, and Gregory, 38 — the largest private landowner in the community.

The 18 properties they have bought were purchased through myriad shell companies, according to public records reviewed by The Post.

“We never really figured out what their purpose in buying so much land could be,” said a former resident who sold their property to the family a few years ago. “But because you can only get here by ferry, we thought they might be building a bunker, away from everyone.”

Six years ago, when Gregory scooped up a 22-acre property on one quiet street, locals suddenly saw a steady flow of construction workers and water tankers arriving a few times a week to fill his pool, rumored to be the largest on the 6.5-mile island, the former resident said.

Cameras have been installed on the street, and local plumbers, carpenters and housekeepers were required to sign nondisclosure agreements in order to work at the property, according to the former resident, who asked not to be identified.

The family bought up all the properties on the road, and petitioned the Shelter Island Town Board to install a security fence on the road to keep locals out. The town blocked those plans because there is a town-owned landing at the end of the road, but residents told The Post they believe it is just a matter of time before the Soros family will get its way.

“We can’t keep up with the lawyers that these millionaires have and they seem to build whatever they want,” said Steve Lenox, a longtime local resident who voiced his concerns at a Shelter Island Town Board meeting on June 29. “That’s what’s ruining the island.”

In addition to the Soros family, real estate developer Stefan Sovoliev recently purchased some of the key businesses on the island, including the historic Chequit Hotel and the Shelter Island Heights Pharmacy, then angering locals by promptly shutting down its prescription service — the only one on the island.

“I’ve seen Montauk turn on a dime, I’ve seen Sag Harbor turn on a dime,” longtime resident Mike Gaynor told this week’s Shelter Island Town Board meeting, referring to Hamptons enclaves that have become unaffordable for locals once the ultra-rich moved in and begin buying up properties. “And in a short period of time, no one is going to afford to live here anymore.”

Shelter Island is approximately 8,000 acres in total. However, a quarter of the land on the island comprises a 2,064-acre Nature Conservancy. With 120 acres, the Soroses control only two percent of the available land, but it is integral real estate. The next largest private landowner Westmoreland Farm, which owns 65.4 acres, public records show.

Suffolk County and the Town of Shelter Island control 551 acres while the Gardiner’s Bay Country Club — a private facility — controls more than 164 acres. The Sylvester Manor Educational Farm, a nonprofit housed in a former slave plantation, controls 238 acres.

The Soros land grab came to light in the last year after the family purchased a 63.6-acre horse farm on Smith Street and erected a deer fence around the property without the proper authorization from the island’s zoning board.

Matthew Christopher Pietras, an assistant to Gregory, represented him at a Zoning Board of Appeals meeting in September, 2024, seeking to build an eight-foot tall fence around the property, according to public records.

Gregory, a conceptual artist, hoped to turn the property into an organic farm with an apple orchard with space for cattle, according to public documents. Months later, in May 2025 Pietras died in a suicide after he was confronted with millions that he had stolen from his clients, including the Soros family.

“Both Pietras and a lawyer whose email was connected with the Soros’ company were at the meeting,” said Gaynor, who has lived on the island for a decade and is a regular at town board meetings. “That’s how we knew that the Soros family was behind the purchase of the farm and the other properties on the island.”

In addition to prime waterfront real estate, the family also owns smaller parcels and homes next to the Shelter Island landfill. Locals say the family is using the smaller properties to house their staff on the island.

One local said they built “dormitory housing” for staff on Bowditch Road. “Now, all the homes around this ugly staff housing dormitory monstrosity cannot sell,” the local said. “They do whatever they want.”

The family began accumulating property after Susan Weber, Soros’ second wife, who he divorced in 2005, bought her sprawling five-bedroom water-front property in the island’s exclusive Dering Harbor neighborhood in 2013 for nearly $6 million. The home was the site of a lavish wedding rehearsal dinner for Alex Soros’ marriage to former Hilary Clinton aide Huma Abedin last year.

The actual wedding took place a short distance away in Watermill, another Hamptons enclave where Alex Soros owns a home.

Alex Soros took over their father’s $25 billion Open Society Foundations empire in 2023.

The family has donated tens of millions to radical progressive political candidates, and recently funneled $102 million through their Democracy Political Action Committee, the super PAC Soros launched in 2020, for progressives running in midterm elections.

The Open Society Foundations did not respond to a request for comment this week.

https://nypost.com/2026/07/02/real-estate/billionaire-soros-clan-scooping-up-property-on-shelter-island/

Isabel Vincent

Published July 2, 2026, 10:12 a.m. PT

Sunday, July 5, 2026