A big thanks is owed. The post The story of how Chicago saved Cheap Trick’s career: “We’re game” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design By Walter Murch Faber & Faber, 368 pages, $45 Now 82 years old, Walter Murch is the Hollywood legend you’ve never heard of. He was the film editor on Julia, the sound editor on Godfather, Godfather II, and American Graffiti, and both film and sound editor on Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, Godfather III, Ghost, The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Cold Mountain, among many other movies. He’s won Oscars in both categories. And now he’s the author of a fun, fascinating book about these often neglected aspects of filmmaking entitled Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design. Murch’s title comes from the Russian author Maxim Gorky, who in 1896, at age 28, attended a screening in Nizhny Novgorod by the Lumière brothers, the French cinematic pioneers whose Cinématographe, a combined camera and projector, enabled them to share the short films they’d made with audiences hither and yon. Cinema was then in its infancy — the brothers had been exhibiting their work publicly for just a year or so — but at first Gorky wasn’t impressed by their revolutionary moving images. What did finally thrill him was something that we would now take entirely for granted: a cut. The brothers’ film had been capturing a street scene in Lyon, and then, as Gorky later wrote, “suddenly something clicks, everything vanishes and a train appears on the screen. It speeds straight at you — watch out! It seems as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit.” Indifferent to the magic of film, in short, Gorky was dazzled by the magic of film editing. Before it was tried, observes Murch, there was no reason to take it for granted that film editing would even “work.” In other words, it might well have turned out that the human brain was not wired in such a way as to process sudden shifts from one moving image to another. Happily, however, “audiences not only quickly grasped the grammar of continuity, but came to enjoy, and then hunger for, those sudden and often delightfully surprising juxtapositions — visual chord changes, so to speak.” There are, Murch points out, two basic ways of thinking about film editing. In the Romance and Slavic languages, the words for film editing — montage, montaggio, montaje, монтаж  — “emphasise the architectural aspects of our work: a plumber will monte together the pipes of a house, just as a film editor will plumb together the shots of a film.” By contrast, the English, German, and Scandinavian words — editing, Schnitt, redigering — “highlight instead the cutting-down and reorganisation of a pre-existing assembly.” Film editing, of course, involves both construction and cutting down, but the ultimate goal is to put something together. Hence Murch prefers the word montage to editing. After all, as he puts it, the word “editor” suggests that a film editor’s task, like that of book or newspaper editors, “is to cut down and rearrange a work created by someone else”; but in reality it’s the film editor “who produces the first version, painstakingly constructing it over many weeks (or months!) from thousands of shots, guided by the screenplay and the director’s notes. This is shown to the director, who suggests changes. And then it is the film editor who makes those changes, producing a second version, which is shown to the director, who suggests further amendments, and so on.” If you think there’s not much of interest to say about film editing and sound editing, Murch proves you wrong on every page. If you think there’s not much of interest to say about film editing and sound editing, Murch proves you wrong on every page. He proffers glimpses of history: “Carl Dreyer’s classic The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) was reassembled out of initially rejected takes after the original cut negative was destroyed by fire at a laboratory in Germany.” He covers technical advances: thanks to the limitations of the optical soundtrack (which was located “just inside the sprockets on every 35mm film print”), film sound was no better in 1970 than in 1940 — but improved radically with the advent of Dolby stereo, first used on Star Wars. Murch reminds us that in some cases, the film editor’s job is a lot bigger than in others. “During Hollywood’s ‘golden age’ (1930–60),” he writes, the shooting ratio — that is, the proportion of exposed film to the amount used in the final cut — “averaged 10:1.” But the number can vary widely: “Many of Alfred Hitchcock’s films had an amazingly low ratio of 3:1. On Zinnemann’s Julia, which I edited in 1977, it was 34:1, ten times Hitchcock’s proportion. On Apocalypse Now the ratio ballooned to 95:1, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) was 240:1, while on Coup 53 it was 266:1, almost a hundred times that of Hitchcock.” But the most engaging parts of the book are the anecdotes drawn from Murch’s own career. He explains in rich detail how, given a week to overhaul an unsatisfactory edit of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 masterpiece The Conversation, he managed — by removing certain sequences and moving various bits and pieces around — to achieve “a quicker alternation” between the scenes focused on character and those focused on advancing the narrative, and thereby dramatically alter the film’s rhythms, increase the tension, add resonance, and highlight the film’s “moral dilemma.” On to The Talented Mr. Ripley, whose producer, Harvey Weinstein, was notorious not only for abusing actresses but, Murch tells us, “for taking versions of the films he was financing back to his editing room in Connecticut to see how he could ‘improve’ them.” This happened with Ripley, whose director, Anthony Minghella (fresh off an Oscar win for The English Patient), “was so outraged that he ‘fired’ Harvey.” The conflict concerned the movie’s last 20 minutes: should Ripley get away with his final murder, or not? In the end, Murch and Minghella came up with an ambiguous ending in which they “fracture[d] the time sequence so that the audience never saw the murder take place, hearing instead its delayed soundtrack, while Ripley, stone-faced and alone in his cabin, was multiply reflected in the slowly swinging mirrored doors of his closet.” Weinstein was satisfied enough with this ending — which was, in fact, perfect — to back off. Murch has another cool Ripley anecdote, this one about the sound. Remember when Ripley (Matt Damon) first meets Dickie (Jude Law) and does a great imitation of Dickie’s father, Herbert Greenleaf (James Rehborn)? When Minghella first shot the scene, “Matt did a workmanlike imitation, but it was not good enough to justify Dickie’s amazed ‘Uncanny!’ reaction.” So during the looping process, a recording of Rebhorn reading Matt’s line was “fed into Matt’s headset” so he could “take those phrases and then convolute his own vocal cords into an astonishing imitation of Rebhorn’s voice.” Alas, the result was so good that Minghella feared cinema-savvy audiences would think it was Rebhorn’s own voice, dubbed in as a cheat. The solution: syllable by syllable, some parts of Matt’s imitation were replaced with earlier takes, making it “less convincing,” and thus, “[i]n a paradoxical way,… more convincing.” Then there’s Murch’s story about restoring Orson Welles’s 1948 classic Touch of Evil. As with many of Welles’s films, the studio — Universal, in this case — had denied him the final cut and released a version that he loathed. Four decades later, Universal changed its mind. Presented with the negative of the final cut, a preview print including missing footage, and a magnetic master of the original soundtrack — as well as with a memo by Welles explaining in detail how he’d re-edit the final cut — Murch was asked to restore the film to match Welles’s vision. Murch recounts this process in exciting detail. I’ll limit myself here to his work on the famous opening shot, which shows Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh walking in a shabby U.S.-Mexico border town and which ends with a car bomb exploding. In the released film, the shot, which was run under the opening titles, had no sound other than the Henry Mancini score; but when Murch stripped away the score from the magnetic masters, “something was revealed that had been hidden for forty years: the sound effects track for this opening scene. It was a complete surprise to us that it even existed, buried as it was under the score.” The track was awash in ambient sound — laughter, sirens, Latin music, goats bleating — and, significantly, the sound of rock ‘n’ roll playing on the radio of the car containing the bomb. As the car kept moving in and out of the shot, the rock ‘n’ roll, too, came and went, enabling the audience to “track the progress of the car with the ticking bomb in it.” Murch’s restoration of this original track ramped up the tension like crazy: “When the opening shot had titles and music on it, the audience would ‘know’ subconsciously that the bomb will not explode until the titles are over. In the new version, there is the possibility that the bomb could go off at any time.” Brilliant. I could read a whole book by Murch about the sound design of The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, scene by scene. Readers of Suddenly Something Clicked will have to be content with somewhat less than that. Remember the “rumbling and piercing metallic scream just before Michael Corleone kills Sollozzo and McCluskey”? Yes, the viewer understands that it’s an elevated train. But we don’t see the train. So for an instant, and “perhaps only subconsciously,” we’re taken aback, perhaps even confused, by the sound — and “precisely because it is so detached from the image, the metallic scream works as a clue to the state of Michael’s mind at that moment — the critical moment before he commits his first murder and his life turns an irrevocable corner. It is all the more effective because Michael’s face appears so calm and the sound is played so abnormally loud.” See what I mean about wanting an entire book about this stuff? But let’s not be greedy. The book in hand is far more than any cineaste could dare ask for. Immensely learned, consistently enthralling, and splendidly written, Suddenly Something Happened is a marvel, its 350 large-format pages incorporating an abundance of photos and graphs, plus a snazzy space-age bonus: a hundred or so marginal QR codes linking to documents, videos, and audio files of interest that illustrate matters discussed in the text. But this volume, remarkably, isn’t Murch’s last word. As he explains in the introduction, the present opus will be succeeded by an even longer one focusing on “the script, the casting and the vision of the director.” I can’t wait. READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: Guess What the New Yorker Thinks of the Kennedy Center’s New Name? What Made Rob Reiner Tick? Can Being Charlie Tell Us Anything About the Reiner Murders?

President Donald Trump’s steadfast resolve to protect the American people from dangerous drugs deserves praise. His administration’s decisive action to attack the cartels smuggling illicit narcotics into our country sends a clear message: The United States once again has a president who puts American lives first. But fentanyl and cocaine aren’t the only harmful drugs being trafficked illegally into and across the United States. The abortion drug mifepristone is poisoning American babies and their mothers at an alarming rate — even in states where abortion is all but banned. (RELATED: The Nation Must Face the Abortion Pill Legal Monster) In fact, an online black market has evolved for the express purpose of facilitating illegal abortions in the United States via mail, and the malign foreign and domestic actors behind it continue to operate unchecked. This is not about “choice.” This is a direct assault on American families. At this very moment, around the country, both women and men are stockpiling abortion drugs that studies have shown to inflict serious harm on more than one in 10 women. Side effects may include hemorrhage, uterine rupture, infection, or even death, yet anyone can now order these pills without even consulting a physician — or the person intended to take them. (RELATED: Texas Might Be the Only State Strong Enough to Face Real Evil) In Louisiana, a woman allegedly coerced her pregnant teenage daughter into taking abortion pills she obtained via mail from a telehealth abortionist in New York. The drugs not only succeeded in killing the unborn child but also landed the teen in the emergency room with life-threatening complications. Other cases have cropped up in Texas, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Florida involving alleged plots to poison unsuspecting women with abortion drugs to kill their unborn babies. These crimes were enabled by the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decision under President Joe Biden to nix its previous requirement that women obtain abortion drugs in person from their doctors. Without that vital safeguard, there is no way for those dispensing these pills to confirm that those taking them even wish to do so, let alone are taking them safely. And to be clear, unless an ultrasound is performed, it is not safe to take these drugs. The chemical abortion regimen, which consists of mifepristone and misoprostol pills, will only successfully terminate intrauterine pregnancies. Embryos that have implanted elsewhere — an uncommon but life-threatening condition called ectopic pregnancy — will not be affected, though the drugs’ side effects may mislead a woman into believing her child was aborted. If an ectopic pregnancy goes undetected for too long, the consequences could be fatal. Those pushing these pills know the risks. But as with the narco-terrorists south of the border, the abortion drug cartel doesn’t concern itself with the lives it ruins. Take the Austria-based abortion vigilante group Aid Access, for example. The service’s stated goal is to “improve the health status and human rights of women.” Yet according to two federal lawsuits, the group has done the exact opposite, smuggling abortion pills to abusers who then use them to harm women and their children. Texas man Jerry Rodriguez filed the first lawsuit in July, identifying Aid Access as the source of the abortion drugs that his girlfriend’s estranged husband pressured her into taking, killing Rodriguez’s unborn child. The second complaint, filed in August, accuses Aid Access of providing Marine pilot Christopher Cooprider with abortion pills, with which he allegedly poisoned plaintiff Liana Davis, causing her to hemorrhage and her unborn baby girl to die. Abortion is illegal in Texas, except when deemed necessary to save a mother’s life (a situation that doesn’t actually exist). But the law is just a nuisance to abortion drug traffickers, a minor obstacle on the path to their perverted form of justice. Nearly 10,000 illegal abortions per month are being facilitated by these illicit operations, according to the pro-abortion Society of Family Planning’s recent #WeCount report. With the help of blue-state shield laws that serve to protect the culprits, the abortion drug cartel is delivering dangerous drugs directly to American doorsteps. Their vision is a world where the nuclear family no longer exists—and they’re getting close. A 2023 Pew Research study found that in 1970, just three years before Roe v. Wade, 67 percent of Americans ages 25 to 49 lived with a spouse and at least one child. By 2021, that share had dropped to just 37 percent. The pro-family Trump administration has every reason to stop the abortion drug traffickers contributing to that decline. Yet aside from promising a review of mifepristone’s safety — a pledge that appears to have been merely performative — administration officials haven’t even acknowledged the rising wave of abortion crime. It’s not from a lack of awareness. State attorneys general and Republicans on Capitol Hill have been sounding the alarm about mifepristone for months. The administration also has plenty of tools at its disposal to end the injustice today. The Comstock Act, for one, has already outlawed mailing abortion-inducing drugs and materials. The 1873 law, long sidelined by Roe, has been fully enforceable since the Supreme Court overturned that moral and legal travesty in 2022. But if enforcing the law is too much to ask, the FDA could simply reinstate its former restrictions to require a doctor’s visit to obtain abortion pills. Unfortunately, administration officials seem to have chosen a third route: the off-ramp. It’s no secret that President Trump thinks abortion is a losing issue for the GOP. With the federal midterm elections next November, he is undoubtedly hoping to protect Republicans’ slim majorities in the House and Senate. But there will always be another election on the horizon. Once the midterms are over, the focus will shift to the 2028 presidential election, and so on, entrapping the American people in an endless cycle of empty “next time” promises. The truth is that if we are ever to succeed in making America, as the president likes to say, “greater than ever before,” human rights must matter more than politics. Every life the abortion drug cartel is allowed to take is another future American family wiped from existence. Who knows how many would-be doctors, scientists, pastors, or even U.S. presidents have already been killed? The power to save future generations of American leaders is within the president’s grasp, and history will judge what he does with it. Will he join the ranks of our heroic forefathers who — unpopularly — launched a revolution, ended slavery, and set a still-unmet national goal of “liberty and justice for all”? Or will he allow those who traffic in death to mar his chapter of American history? The time to decide is now. READ MORE from Samantha Flom: The Nation Must Face the Abortion Pill Legal Monster Eugenics: The Dark Side of IVF We Are Charlie Kirk, And We Will Not Be Silenced. Samantha Flom is a senior investigative researcher for Restoration News and author of Pill Pushers: How a Dark Political Agenda Made Abortion More Dangerous Than Ever.

If hindsight is 20/20, then 2025 was a year where irony is produced by algorithms and politicians think diplomacy is a TikTok trend. To toast our survival is the annual Rear-View Awards, the only column where irony is not just a category, it is the entire piece. Metaphor of the year: Hollywood director Rob Reiner, the onetime foil to Archie Bunker, was apparently murdered by his son, proving that sitcom dysfunction can mirror life and be All in the Family. Best market correction: Hunter Biden is no longer getting $400,000 for his artwork. He is down to 100 bucks to spray-paint obscenities on a Tesla. Stat of the year: The New York Times ran a story on how foreign travel to the U.S. is down due to what the Gray Lady calls the Trump Slump. This is believable when you consider that for the last four years, our number one tourist attraction was the Rio Grande. Question: When will scientists admit that the climate has been changing long before humans invented SUVs, plastic straws, or had opinions? Cover-Up: Jake Tapper’s book, Original Sin, exposed the media’s four-year whitewash of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.  The canard that Biden was sharp, the border secure, Trump colluded with Russia, and Hunter’s laptop was fake, Tapper reveals what Washington long knew: Biden was unfit for office as early as 2017. The book recounts one particular moment of confusion when, at a Beverly Hills fundraiser, Biden failed to recognize George Clooney and told Obama how much he loved him in Driving Miss Daisy. The Oxford Word of the Year is actually two words: “rage bait” because apparently “click bait” wasn’t emotionally ruinous enough. Linguists use “rage bait” for anything that divides or offends.  Last year’s phrase was “brain rot,” the term for scrolling ourselves into mental mush. Together, they sum up digital life: outrage sparks engagement, algorithms fan the flames, while burning a hole in your cornea. All in a name: As of this writing, the U.S. Navy destroyed its 5th Venezuelan drug boat. The boat didn’t have a chance with its name: Coke Zero. Best laugh: During warm‑ups for the 2025 WNBA All‑Star Game, players wore shirts stitched by Asian slave labor that read: “Pay Us What You Owe Us,” a bold slogan for a league so cash‑strapped it can barely afford the thread. Political Twister: President Trump’s deal with Nippon Steel because nothing says “America First” like outsourcing patriotism to a Japanese steel conglomerate. Two weeks before the deal, Turner Classic Movies spent Memorial Day defeating the Japanese. For Japan to save U.S. Steel shortly thereafter is political good sportsmanship. Melancholy medal: When you realize 1972 and 2025 are as far apart as 1972 and 1919.  Congratulations, you are officially older than your nostalgia. The Confirmation Cup: In 2025, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner ditched a 140‑year ritual and refused to toast the president, an unexpected move that validated Donald Trump’s longtime complaints about media bias. Truth is stranger than fiction: After the Hooters restaurant chain went bust, Democrats disrupted a Senate hearing to protest a Kennedy being nominated for a cabinet post by a Republican president. More effective than coal: Children awoke this Christmas to disappointment after discovering that Santa had revised his disciplinary policy and is now punishing naughty kids with tickets to the New York Giants. Provided such naughty behavior continues, Colorado Rockies tickets will be featured next year. Book of the year: The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer. Daniel J. Flynn’s biography of Frank S. Meyer uncovers how a Marxist firebrand became a founding architect of conservative “fusionism,” blending liberty and tradition into the movement’s philosophical backbone. It’s a richly researched portrait of a restless, contradictory thinker whose ideas still echo through today’s political discourse. To honor the memory of my longtime friend and Marine veteran who, along with his son, gave his life in the defense of their home during Hurricane Sandy in Staten Island, the 13th Annual John Filipowicz Award is awarded to Maria Maresca. Army Fire Support Officer Maresca stands watch along the 38th parallel, echoing the service of her grandfather, Marine Sgt. Frank Maresca, who fought in Korea 73 years ago. READ MORE from Greg Maresca: When Parenthood Becomes a Purchase Unheralded and Autonomous: The Army–Navy Game The First Snowfall’s Bitter Welcome

The Christmas season is a time to reflect on what we have, which includes the kind of society that has made countless blessings possible. The warmth, security, and generosity that many Americans experience during the holidays are not accidents or pure gifts of nature. In their tangible sense, they are the products of a long and extraordinary period of economic growth — one that has expanded opportunity, reduced hardship, and given moral ideals room to breathe. Cheap, reliable energy … is a prerequisite for housing, manufacturing, transportation, and medical care. History shows quite clearly that the societies most capable of generosity and liberalism are not those trapped in poverty but those that have escaped it. An abundance of wealth does not corrupt moral life; it enables it. Economic growth is not a rival to our highest values. It’s a precondition to their most vigorous pursuit. This truth is easy to forget precisely because modern growth has been so successful. We take for granted the material abundance that allows us to debate its spiritual costs. For most of human existence, life was defined by constant vulnerability. Hunger, disease, and early death were ever-present. The idea that ordinary people could expect anything different — let alone genuine comfort or opportunity — would sound fantastical to our preindustrial ancestors. As economic historians like Deirdre McCloskey have shown, the dramatic acceleration of growth beginning in the 19th century — the “Great Enrichment” — transformed human prospects on a scale unmatched by any previous moral or political revolution. Living standards rose exponentially. Poverty declined. Education spread. And with this abundance came a greater capacity for tolerance, pluralism, and peaceful coexistence. This connection is not accidental. In “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth,” Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman shows that societies experiencing sustained growth tend to be more generous and more committed to liberal values than others. When people believe the future can be better than the past, politics becomes less of a zero-sum fight over seemingly fixed resources. And cooperation becomes easier. The reverse is also true. When growth slows, even affluent societies begin to fray. Zero-sum thinking returns — not necessarily because people are poor or because they have changed, but because progress no longer feels assured. In a different economic environment, politics turns inward and resentful. Scapegoats are sought, historically including immigrants, Jews, and other minorities, trade, big businesses, and rich people. Illiberal ideas gain traction. Seen in this light, today’s anxieties are less mysterious. After decades of slowed productivity growth, many Americans — especially younger ones — no longer feel confident their work will be rewarded or that the future will be more abundant than the past. Nostalgia on the right and a constant sense of oppression on the left are responses to a perceived closing of opportunity. To reverse these destructive reactions, we must rebuild the conditions for abundance. It requires no massive new spending, protectionism, or industrial strategies. It only requires removing government obstacles to work, building, and innovation. Take labor markets, where occupational licensing has spread far beyond any plausible public-safety rationale. It’s barring entry into modest, safe jobs, protecting established workers at the expense of younger, lower-income workers, and raising consumer costs. Scope-of-practice rules limit competition and access to health care by preventing nurse practitioners and physician assistants from providing affordable services they are fully capable of delivering. Labor markets grow when access to work is governed by competence and demand, not by layers of permission requirements. No less essential is energy abundance. Modern economies run on energy, yet the United States increasingly constrains supply through permitting delays and regulatory uncertainty. Cheap, reliable energy — whether from fossil fuels, nuclear, or renewables — is a prerequisite for housing, manufacturing, transportation, and medical care. Regulatory sclerosis afflicts housing and infrastructure in other ways. We generously subsidize buying while relentlessly constraining supply, guaranteeing higher prices and rising frustrations. Zoning rules and endless permitting requirements have turned productive cities into closed clubs, locking out families and workers who could thrive there. Trade policy, too, has moved in the wrong direction. Tariffs — effectively taxes on consumers and input costs for producers — have hit us hard during the last three presidential administrations. They raise prices, create uncertainty, and slow growth. Across these areas, the pattern is the same. So is the answer: Freeing supply would create tremendous growth. Consider this my Christmas wish. As an economist, this holiday season reminds me that generosity requires capacity — not just money but time. It’s easier to help the vulnerable and sustain a pluralistic society when the economy is expanding rather than stagnating. Growth, in short, makes us more capable of being good to one another. Among the most important gifts we can pass on is a society that is confident enough in its future to be generous in the present. READ MORE from Veronique de Rugy: The Quiet Engine Behind Gen Z and Millennial Malaise Giving Thanks for Our Sometimes-Maligned Constitution and Creed The Answer to Republicans’ ‘Affordability Problem’? Unleash Supply. Veronique de Rugy is the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. To find out more about Veronique de Rugy and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM

When a state cannot reliably distinguish adults from children, every child-only safeguard becomes conditional. Schools, care homes, foster placements, and youth accommodation stop being protections and start being bets. Britain learned that lesson again in late 2025, not because the system malfunctioned, but because it operated exactly as designed. In December 2025, a British court convicted Jan Jahanzeb and Israr Niazal, two Afghan asylum seekers, of the rape of a British schoolgirl. The crime itself was brutal. What should disturb us just as deeply is not only who committed it, but how they came to be placed in proximity to children at all. (RELATED: Importing Chaos: The Paradox of Nation-building) Both men entered the United Kingdom claiming to be unaccompanied minors. On that basis, they were not processed as adults moving through a migration system, but treated as children requiring care. They were placed into child-specific accommodation, education, and safeguarding frameworks, spaces that exist only because society accepts a degree of trust in exchange for the protection of minors. Court reporting shows that Jahanzeb underwent an age assessment on arrival that concluded he was 17, while Niazal was likewise accepted into the system as an unaccompanied child asylum seeker and placed into care before the offence occurred. Responsibility for the crime lies entirely with the perpetrators. Responsibility for placing unvetted adults among children lies with the system. That procedural detail matters. In Britain’s migration system, age determines placement. Those treated as minors are routed into child-only settings. Adults are not. In this case, the men were treated as minors before any robust, formal process had resolved doubts about their age, and were placed accordingly. The assault did not occur because of age fraud. It occurred in a setting made possible by unresolved or weakly resolved age claims. Responsibility for the crime lies entirely with the perpetrators. Responsibility for placing unvetted adults among children lies with the system. This was not an unforeseeable breakdown. The numbers have been pointing in this direction for years. Home Office data reported in December 2025 show that the number of people identified as adults after claiming to be children has quadrupled over the past decade, rising from 224 cases in 2014 to more than 1,000 a year. Between mid-2022 and mid-2024, the U.K. Border Force raised 11,449 formal age disputes involving self-declared minors. Of the 8,791 cases resolved, 3,570 were found to involve adults. Nor is this a recent development. An analysis by MigrationWatch UK, drawing on official age-check outcomes between 2016 and 2020, found that more than half of asylum seekers whose ages were examined after claiming to be under 18, around 1,600 of roughly 3,100 cases, were ultimately assessed to be adults. More recent reporting suggests the scale has grown further. GB News, citing Home Office data obtained by the outlet, reported that thousands of people have been found to misstate their age in bids to gain asylum. The courts have been forced to intervene. In a separate 2025 case, a Sudanese asylum seeker who arrived by small boat and claimed to be 16 was found by the Court of Appeal to have deliberately sought to mislead about his age and lost his appeal against being treated as an adult. Where age determines access to foster care, schools, youth accommodation, and child-only services, misclassification becomes a safeguarding failure, not a paperwork error. Britain has already seen where this can lead. Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai, an Afghan asylum seeker who provably lied about his age, was convicted of fatally stabbing Tom Roberts, a 21-year-old aspiring Royal Marine, after being treated as a minor and placed into youth accommodation. Responding to that case, Reform U.K. MP Rupert Lowe warned that authorities often have no idea how many of the people who come here claiming to be children are adults, and that unresolved age claims place minors at risk. All of this sits uneasily alongside the Home Office’s own guidance. The department’s Assessing Age policy, updated in June 2025, sets out when age assessment is required, how Merton-compliant assessments should be conducted, and why age cannot be determined by appearance alone. Britain is not alone. Where European states have actually tested claimed ages, the results have often been even starker. In Switzerland, authorities recorded 2,639 applications from unaccompanied minors in 2024. Of the 1,304 cases formally assessed, 719, around 55 percent, were found to be adults. In Austria, 56 percent of 489 multifactorial age assessments in 2023 concluded the applicant was not a minor, followed by 111 further adult determinations in 2024. (RELATED: Asylum to Austerity: Germany Leads Europe’s Retreat From Open-Ended Migration) Belgium reported that of 2,345 self-declared unaccompanied minors registered in 2024, 823, more than one in three, were ultimately classified as adults. In Ireland, late 2025 reporting showed that nearly 200 people placed into children’s accommodation over three years were later found to be adults, meaning adults had been housed directly within child protection facilities. Following the 2015 migration surge, Sweden found that roughly 80 percent of those presenting as minors were adults once assessed, with Denmark reporting similar outcomes. (RELATED: Poland’s Fusion of Hard Borders and Human Duty) Most recently, Greece introduced a new age-verification framework and published early results in November 2025 showing that more than 60 percent of 104 self-declared minors were adults once examined. Across borders, legal systems, and assessment methods, the conclusion is unavoidable. When age is examined seriously, adulthood is frequently revealed. European institutions acknowledge the difficulty. The European Union Agency for Asylum recognises that age assessment must be holistic and cautious, but also that no system can operate safely if age remains unresolved at the point of placement. The British schoolgirl raped by Jahanzeb and Niazal did not consent to live under a system that resolves doubt only after harm occurs. She was owed the most basic protection the state offers any child, separation from unvetted adults. That protection was not provided. This is not a debate about ideology. It is about function. A system that cannot reliably distinguish adults from children cannot responsibly operate child-only protections. The events of late 2025 did not create that problem. They made it impossible to ignore. READ MORE from Kevin Cohen: Hollow Sanctuaries: When Churches Become Mosques When Honor Walks Into a Liberal Democracy In Minnesota, Echoes of Failed Somali Experiment in Europe

Subscribe to the 2nd channel - https://www.youtube.com/@LukeRudkowski76 check out the podcast here - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLagHa1QjXUIgTW8lbzG6lOKAig0yKUDD1 NEW MERCH - https://thebestpoliticalshirts.com/ The MIT Scientist warned of a cataclysmic pole shift… Now he’s gone

from DAHBOO77: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

from ZeroHedge: Russian forces continue their steady battlefield gains this week, but Kiev is still seeking to grasp at establishing some sort of leverage at the negotiating table, as the Trump peace plan is still being pushed in back-and-forth US dialogue with Moscow representatives. Over the past some 24 hours, Russian troops have captured the settlement […]

The "Burn It Down" singer shared the best kind of Christmas surprise — he and wife Hallie are expecting another baby boy next summer. Continue reading…