Airplanes at the Denver International Airport in Denver, Colo., on Sept. 13, 2025. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch TimesThe Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is issuing a new mandatory rule that requires…

Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducts a lethal kinetic strike on an alleged drug boat in the Eastern Pacific on Feb. 9, 2026. US Southern Command/Screenshot via The Epoch TimesU.S. Southern Command…

Chris Paul of the Los Angeles Clippers watches from the bench during a game against the Suns at Mortgage Matchup Center in Phoenix on Nov. 6, 2025. Christian Petersen/Getty ImagesWhat was expected to…

One of the most visible actions after the U.S. Senate failed to pass the House version of a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security this week was Democrats swiftly hightailing it out of Washington,…

Law enforcement personnel with the Pima County Sheriff’s Department (PCSO) and the FBI have detained multiple people for questioning after carrying out a raid the Catalina Foothills neighborhood in…

Technology changes, lifestyles evolve, and yet, many of us still hold on to items that no longer serve a purpose. If you’re ready to create more space and simplicity in your home, here are 26 things you can declutter right away—because in 2026, you just don’t need them anymore. 1. CDs Streaming services and digital […] The post The Year is 2026. Here are 26 Things You Can Declutter Right Away appeared first on No Sidebar.

Foreign Affairs Lessons for Venezuela From Two Afghanistan Wars The dysfunctions of Soviet and American interventions in Central Asia could be replicated closer to home. (Photo by WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images) The 20-year American adventure in Afghanistan, just a little younger than your humble author, came to an end a few years ago. It ended far more unceremoniously than it began: People clinging to the final planes departing from the airport and the almost immediate collapse of the hilariously corrupt government we helped empower were the final humiliations.  This is not to say there was an alternative on the table; the American exit was always going to be chaotic. Yet it was still what the people voted for: The winning candidates in both 2016 and 2020 vowed to end the war. The former signed the withdrawal agreement, and the latter executed it—a far cry from the Freedom Agenda undergirding the 2005 inaugural address. The closest analogue for the American invasion of Afghanistan was the Soviet one 20-odd years earlier. Unlike the Soviets, American troops went in initially as invading forces, whereas the Soviets initially entered to stabilize an incumbent Afghan government that had overthrown the last one. Like the Soviets, the Americans found themselves unable to extricate themselves from the country or its politics, although, to their credit, the Soviet-installed leader lasted post-occupation for a few years, whereas the American-backed one didn’t last as long as some milk.  Like the Soviets, the Americans dreamed of liberating and liberalizing institutions. Vladimir Snegirev, a Soviet advisor pointed out the clash of civilizations set up by the communist invasion when he argued that there  is a striking contrast, which is only possible here: many of the women on the terraces conceal their faces under the chador—a primitive, medieval superstition; but parachutists are landing in the stadium and they are women too, who grew up in this country. The chador and the parachute. You don’t have to be a prophet to foretell the victory of the parachute. Thirty years later, the U.S. envoy to Afghanistan argued to widespread mockery that the women of the beleaguered country required “black girl magic”—though, to her credit, she was no less wrong than the Soviets. Both invasions also engendered significant domestic opposition. Some of the most powerful civilian organizations in the history of the Soviet Union came about as a result of those killed in action, and the mismanagement of the Afghanistan war is arguably one of the things that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a whole. American opposition to the invasion was initially muted, though it also grew as the scale and mismanagement of the conflict became more widely known. By the end, Soviet correspondents sounded as annoyed as your standard mid-2000s paleocon; some argued that “the blood of our sons is being spilled in a foreign land for the interests of foreigners,” which is not dissimilar to an antiwar line taken by some in the United States.  The Russian experience is more than a historical footnote. It could end up being instructive for the U.S. today. The Soviets couldn’t sustain enthusiasm for a war happening in a country separated from theirs by a bridge; is it any wonder the US was unable to muster continuous support 30 years later in the same place? More to the point, what does this suggest about the U.S. ability to wage war closer to the homeland today, and what citizens may or may not be willing to tolerate? American enthusiasm for limited strikes in Venezuela is present but muted, especially compared to public opinion in the early days of shock and awe. Sustained occupation of the sort required to ensure skittish capital to commit seems to be more than what either American politicians or the American people are interested in. This is without the general consequence of regime-change operations: the refugees that tend to follow. There is a case to be made that Nicolas Maduro’s downfall could reverse the nearly 8 million refugee outflow under his rule. Yet, given that his vice president and other leaders involved with human-rights abuses are leading a far more paranoid and fragile regime, it seems unlikely there will be a mass return. Given the lack of clarity around the future of the nation, it is more likely that more refugees will be the result.  In recent history, one benefit of U.S.-backed regime change in the Middle East was that the inevitable refugee crises wound up being far bigger problems for our European or Middle Eastern allies, who were less geographically fortunate than for those of us an ocean away. But if we choose to engage in these activities without that ocean in between, we’d be foolish to think we’d be immune to the consequences of these actions out of a desire to own the hemisphere. The Soviets entered Afghanistan looking to project their empire over more of the continent. They instead wound up destroying the entire thing.  The post Lessons for Venezuela From Two Afghanistan Wars appeared first on The American Conservative.

UK Special Coverage Britain’s ‘Turkish Barber’ Phenomenon Organized crime flourishes in deep Britain under the state’s benign neglect. UK Special Coverage url=https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:13_Bridge_Street,_Mansfield.jpg Credit: Alan Murray-Rust / ‘Thirteen’, Bridge Street, Mansfield / CC BY-SA 2.0 Most visitors to Britain will probably head straight for Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, or Shakespeare’s Stratford. But should you wander off the tourist trail, you’ll soon notice a curious abundance of Turkish barbershops. It might seem strange enough that these hairdressers are literally everywhere. Stranger still is that there’s rarely anyone in any of them who is actually having their hair cut. There are at least 13 Turkish-style barbers on a one-mile length of Streatham High Road in south London. Along Kingsland Road in Dalston, east London, there are over 16. All of them offer similar services: sharp haircuts, skin fades, wet shaves with a straight-razor and hot towel, and ear- and nose-waxing—and at tantalizingly cheap prices. None of this, it seems, is of much interest to passing customers. If this were a phenomenon confined to London, it would hardly be worth commenting on. But Turkish barbers are proliferating well beyond the capital, across the length and breadth of the UK. You’ll see them in plush market towns, fading former coal-mining villages, out-of-town shopping parades. Settlements that would struggle to sustain a few pubs and grocery stores have all got a Turkish barber. Porth, a town in south Wales with a population of fewer than 6,000, is now home to 14 barbershops, many of them Turkish-style. That’s one for every 426 residents.  There has been a 50 percent climb in the number of barbershops in the UK since 2018, and I dare say this has nothing to do with men taking better care of themselves. (Meanwhile, women’s hair salons have actually been in decline.) Pity the fool who actually pays a fiver or a tenner in exchange for a haircut. A former intern of mine, new to the UK, will never make that mistake again. The best-case scenario is that your new hairstyle will draw widespread mockery. Unluckier clients have caught ringworm, as the untrained “stylists” tend not to sterilize their tools between jobs. TikTok is ablaze with videos of angry Gen Z-ers with messed-up hairlines, saying they’ve been ‘done dirty’ and are now ‘cooked’, courtesy of their local Turkish barber. It doesn’t take an MI5 intelligence officer to work out what is really going on here. Many of these Turkish-style barbers are money-laundering fronts for gangs, usually involved in drugs or human trafficking. In this sense, the “Turkish” moniker is unfair. The fronts are more likely to be operated by Albanians (the undisputed kingpins of Britain’s drug trade), Iraqi Kurds, or Iranians. Some of these ‘businesses’ report takings of £100,000 to £150,000 per month—even those outside of London and on streets with multiple “competitors.” There’s no doubt that the public feels unsettled by all this. For many parts of the UK, it is the clearest sign they have that the nation they grew up in has changed irrevocably—and one of the clearest manifestations of the rapid, seismic changes in Britain that have elevated the Reform Party to lead the national polls. The illegal boats in the English Channel they read about in the papers, or the urban crime waves they see on the nightly news, have spread out of the cities and now touch their lives directly. The tentacles of organized crime have stretched into places that, even if not well-to-do, at least had a certain innocence. And you would have to be spectacularly unobservant not to notice all this change. For many, the Turkish barber phenomenon is an embodiment of “broken Britain.” It speaks not only to demographic change and crime, but also to a stagnating economy and to an unresponsive government.  Thanks to Britain’s economic decay, especially outside of London, would-be tenants have access to vast numbers of empty locations and boarded-up storefronts. These can then be snapped up easily and cheaply. And while regular, honest businesses may be buckling, the black markets in illicit substances and labor are positively booming. Indeed, once a gang has acquired a money-laundering storefront, they will put the illegal migrants to work, either in the fake barbershops, usually just to stand around and look busy, or to push drugs—often, it has to be said, just as ineffectively as they cut hair. In one infamous case, an illiterate Iraqi former goat herder was caught selling cocaine in the small Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth (population: 14,000). The man could barely speak English and was so illiterate that he needed his own name tattooed on his arm. He was arrested within five days of arriving in the town. The gang that trafficked him to Britain used barbershops and car washes as fronts.  But drug dealing and trafficking are arguably the least of it. The owner of Boss Crew Barbers in Hammersmith in west London was convicted in 2022 of funding ISIS terrorists. To add the icing on the cake, he had claimed government grants for his store being closed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Although the public has long smelled a rat when it comes to Turkish barbers, the authorities have been slow to respond at scale, beyond investigating individual fronts or gangs. It’s not hard to conclude that, as with the now internationally notorious “grooming gangs” scandal, political correctness has played a role in this paralysis. No officer who wants to keep his career wants to be the one to suggest interrogating hard-working and enterprising migrants. Police chiefs insist it is far too “complex” to nail these criminal enterprises, even those that are operating in plain sight. But reality can only be ignored for so long. The National Crime Agency (the closest thing the UK has to the FBI) finally began large-scale investigations into the barbershop phenomenon in early 2025. By the autumn, “Operation Machinize” had led to more than 900 arrests and around £10.7 million of suspected criminal proceeds seized. This was barely enough to scratch the surface of this vast criminal underbelly that now stretches across the UK, but it was at least the first clear acknowledgement that something not only should be done, but also could be done, with enough political will there.  Yet even now that it is well established that many of these premises are fronts for organized crime, it is still uncouth in polite society to say so. Only this week, a minister in the Labour government accused Nigel Farage of dog-whistle racism for promising harsher crackdowns on Turkish barbershops. Robert Jenrick, a former Conservative shadow minister who recently defected to Farage’s Reform UK, was roundly chastised by the media last year merely for saying the proliferation of these barbershops seemed “weird.” He clearly spoke for many across the country who, if not yet full converts to Reform, are becoming Reform-curious. Much of life in Britain seems increasingly “weird,” yet no one in the political mainstream seems willing to acknowledge this.  Anyone who boards a train in the UK will have heard the same government slogan repeatedly played over the PA system: “If you see something that doesn’t look right: see it, say it, sorted.” Officially, we are supposed to tell the authorities about literally anything that arouses our suspicions. Unofficially, if that “something” involves illegal migration or some protected group, we all know we’re expected to simply keep it to ourselves. To keep calm and carry on. The post Britain’s ‘Turkish Barber’ Phenomenon appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Don’t Trade Away America for Some Soybeans Beijing is playing the long game. Washington needs to do the same. (Frank Bach/Shutterstock) The cliché holds that China plans in decades while America plans in election cycles. Increasingly, though, our thinking seems to stop even sooner—around the length of a crop cycle. Not as an agricultural policy, but as a governing instinct. Soybeans are a solid proxy for how the United States deals with China: small, transactional, immediately legible “wins” pitched as strategic breakthroughs. A shipment resumes, a statistic ticks up, a headline declares progress. Meanwhile, Beijing quietly continues accumulating long-term advantages. Take the most recent “win.” China “resumes” U.S. soybean purchases and the headlines dutifully follow. But the underlying data tells a different story. Even after this supposed thaw, U.S. soybean exports to China remain down roughly 99 percent from historical levels. Despite all the hype, China is on track to register its lowest share of U.S. soybean exports since 2002. The soybean theory rests on a simple insight: America evaluates success through events, while China evaluates success through positioning. We ask whether something happened. They ask whether something became permanent. China doesn’t need to win negotiations. It shapes the environment in which negotiations occur. That means controlling inputs, bottlenecks, and systems that persist regardless of who occupies office in Washington. This pattern is not new. It is how U.S.–China diplomacy has operated for decades. Consider the Phase One trade deal from 2020. It was heralded as a turning point and proof that tough negotiation had forced Beijing to change course. China pledged to purchase an additional $200 billion in U.S. goods and services. The enforcement mechanism, however, relied largely on consultations and discretionary “snapback” tariffs. In practice, China never came close to meeting its commitments. Independent tracking found Beijing fulfilled only about 58–60 percent of its promised purchases across 2020 and 2021. There were no meaningful penalties. The deal expired. The headlines moved on. China’s industrial assault on America continued. The soybean theory played out perfectly: a visible agreement, a short-term sense of resolution, and no lasting shift in position. Go back further and the pattern scales up. When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, the argument in Washington was that integration would produce convergence toward liberalization and rules-based behavior. Instead, China used WTO access to accelerate a state-led, mercantilist model while exploiting weak enforcement mechanisms and asymmetric compliance. Even U.S. trade officials now acknowledge that China retained extensive state control, subsidized national champions, and evaded meaningful discipline while benefiting from open Western markets. The United States gained cheaper consumer goods. China gained industrial dominance. Once again, America focused on the transaction, while China focused on the system. Chinese leaders have repeatedly framed competition with the United States as a long historical process in which “time and momentum” favor China. Short-term economic pain is acceptable if it advances long-term positioning. Small concessions are trivial if they buy strategic breathing room. That is why soybeans are such effective currency. They are economically marginal to China’s long-term objectives. Beijing can source them elsewhere tomorrow. That makes them a perfect symbolic gesture to absorb attention while larger, irreversible gains continue elsewhere. The same logic governs rare earths.  China has secured dominance across the entire supply chain, not just one link. Today, it accounts for roughly 60 to 70 percent of global rare-earth mining and more than 85 to 90 percent of global processing and refining capacity, giving Beijing leverage at both the extraction and transformation stages. That control is not abstract. China has repeatedly shown a willingness to weaponize access through export restrictions, licensing requirements, and informal slowdowns to extract political and economic concessions.  That leverage has already surfaced in recent talks, where Beijing has quietly floated rare-earth export controls—including what Chinese officials themselves have described as a “nuclear option”—as a reminder that negotiations do not take place on neutral terrain. The Belt and Road Initiative, China’s global investment strategy, follows the same logic. It is about geopolitical positioning, not development. Ports, railways, power grids, and debt structures do not disappear when administrations change or trade agreements expire. While America negotiates deals and pushes unpopular cultural programs, China accumulates leverage. And through all of this, Washington keeps falling for the soybeans. Still. Empires do not collapse because they fail to negotiate. They collapse because they lose the ability to distinguish between tactics and strategy, symbols and structure. Nero played the fiddle while Rome burned. America celebrates soybeans while the architecture of the world is quietly being rearranged. The post Don’t Trade Away America for Some Soybeans appeared first on The American Conservative.