The Times of London has quietly removed the central allegation from a report on Conservative Party leader Olukemi Badenoch’s meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in Rome. The story, which led The Times website on Tuesday, and featured prominently in the physical newspaper, claimed the Italian PM urged Badenoch not to make a deal with Nigel Farage and Reform UK.

After an investigation by The National Pulse, however, The Times – owned by Rupert Murdoch – was forced to materially change its story, leaving only around 30 percent of the original content intact. The paper included no correction, no editor’s note, and no further explanation to readers. The drastically altered article still bears a poll relevant to their original headline: “Meloni warns friend Badenoch against deal with Farage,” and most of the comments relate to that story, even though all reference to the “deal,” as well as Reform or Farage have now been removed from the story.

The National Pulse spoke with sources close to Meloni on Tuesday morning, who confirmed that no such conversation had taken place. The sources explained that the lie had been exposed to the Italian press immediately, and then to The Times, whose Political Editor, Steve Swinford, appears to have filed verbatim from the Conservative Party leader’s press team, without fact-checking with Meloni’s office, or even double-sourcing the story.

The report initially presented this as a significant intervention from one conservative leader to another. Badenoch, it said, was resisting pressure to cooperate with Farage’s Reform, with Meloni supposedly advising her to hold the line. It was precisely the sort of foreign endorsement the Tory leader’s camp would like to have: Meloni, Europe’s most electorally successful right-wing prime minister, apparently backing Badenoch against the insurgent party threatening to consume the Conservatives.

But Meloni’s Brothers of Italy has now flatly denied the conversation took place.

In a clarification now reported by both Italian and European outlets, sources close to Meloni said she had never advised Badenoch against an alliance with Farage or Reform UK. They stressed that Meloni had “no reason for hostility” towards Farage’s movement, and said she neither had entered nor wished to enter the domestic political dynamics between British parties.

The original article, originally 756 words, became a 477-word piece with a new, innocuous headline: “I want to revive economy like Giorgia Meloni did, says Kemi Badenoch.”

What remained was a substantially less dramatic account of two friendly politicians discussing the economy, wealthy people leaving their countries, Ukraine, and Meloni’s political path.

The Times has erased the central claims of their own story without so much as a note at the top or bottom – a fundamentally dishonest response never seen before in UK media.

The episode leaves serious questions for Steve Swinford, Badenoch, and Conservative Party headquarters.

1. Who briefed the purported conversation?
2. Did Badenoch’s team supply the anti-Reform framing?
3. Was the story double-sourced with anyone close to Meloni before publication?
4. Why did The Times apparently accept a claim so politically convenient to the Tory leader without obtaining meaningful confirmation from the Italian side?

Until those questions are answered, the reasonable inference is that the Conservatives appear to have fabricated a private exchange with Meloni in order to weaponise her prestige against Reform, while The Times bought it hook, line, and sinker.

The paper of record and the establishment party have once again demonstrated that they are two cheeks of the same arse: one supplying the spin, the other laundering it into fact, and nothing but excrement coming out.

The National Academy of Sciences has been forced to remove a long-disputed climate-science chapter from an influential judicial reference manual, but critics say its own internal process review is not enough to repair the damage done by the 183-year-old institution which was founded by President Abraham Lincoln.

The disputed climate-science chapter appeared in the 2025 fourth edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, produced by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) with the Federal Judicial Center (FJC). The manual was intended to “help” federal judges evaluate complex scientific and technical evidence presented in court.

But the FJC had to remove the chapter after Republican attorneys general, lawmakers, and legal experts found contributions penned by contributors locked in litigation against energy companies. The conflict of interest was never declared, and NASEM even initially kept the material online before reversing course on August 7.

“The NAS has determined that questions about the processes used to develop the chapter warrant an independent review, and the chapter will not appear on our website while that review is underway,” the organization recently announced.

But to date, NASEM has not publicly identified who will conduct the review, disclosed its full scope, or even established a timetable for completion. The organization also admitted that the inquiry concerns its procedures rather than the underlying validity of climate science.

Critics are now arguing that this distinction protects the chapter’s conclusions before the investigation has even begun, rendering this internal review pointless. They contend that a review controlled or commissioned by the institution responsible for publishing the material cannot credibly determine whether the process was compromised.

The controversy centers on Michael Burger, executive director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and an of-counsel attorney at Sher Edling. The law firm represents state and local governments seeking damages from energy companies over alleged climate-related harms.

Sher Edling’s own biography of Burger states that he helps public agencies pursue fossil-fuel companies and has submitted briefs in climate cases. The firm has also undertaken climate litigation through contingency-fee arrangements, giving it a direct financial interest in successful claims against energy producers.

An April Oversight Project investigation used the iThenticate research-integrity service to compare the judicial chapter with previously published work. It reported a 33% overall similarity score, including a 23% match with a 2020 climate-attribution paper coauthored by Burger and the chapter’s two listed authors, Jessica Wentz and Radley Horton.

The chapter also acknowledged Burger only for providing “insights and helpful feedback.” The Oversight Project has argued that the scale of the textual overlap indicates a substantially greater contribution than that description suggests.

The dispute, therefore, extends far beyond competing interpretations of climate science. Material designed to guide federal judges on questions of attribution, causation, and damages drew heavily upon work involving an attorney connected to plaintiffs litigating those same questions.

Critics are now calling for the chapter’s permanent removal, the release of records concerning its drafting and review, and an outside examination of every participant’s legal, financial, and institutional interests. They also argue that the controversy is not confined to one chapter.

NASEM’s recently published report on extreme-weather attribution has also faced congressional scrutiny over possible conflicts involving committee members and organizations supporting climate-accountability litigation. House Science Committee leaders requested information about the committee’s composition, disclosure rules, closed meetings, and safeguards against outside influence.

There now looks to be a broader institutional problem, requiring scrutiny of NASEM’s climate-related committees, publications, reviewers, and conflict-of-interest procedures, rather than a narrow review of the one judicial chapter.

Federal funding has also now entered the dispute, with The Oversight Project reporting that federal sources account for a substantial share of NASEM’s budget. They’re urging Congress to reconsider taxpayer support for institutions producing material that could impede President Donald J. Trump’s energy-dominance agenda.

Until the reviewers, evidence, and standards are fully disclosed, the process will remain vulnerable to the charge that it is intended to preserve NASEM’s credibility and federal funding rather than establish how litigation interests gained influence over supposedly impartial judicial guidance.

The New York Times has quietly added editor’s notes to nine columns by failed Oregon gubernatorial candidate Nicholas Kristof after admitting that the veteran opinion writer repeatedly failed to disclose that people he quoted, or organizations he promoted, had financed his short-lived campaign.

The newspaper has called the omissions an oversight and says its review is complete, yet The National Pulse can reveal that none of the four favorable columns involving Bill Gates or the Gates Foundation identified in the original report was among those corrected, despite Gates and his then-wife, Melinda French Gates, having given Kristof’s campaign $50,000 apiece.

KRISTOF AND THE TIMES.

Semafor broke the original story in June, finding at least a dozen instances in which Kristof had written about his own former supporters without telling readers about their donations. This, despite an explicit promise by the New York Times, when Kristof returned to the paper, that he would either refrain from writing about his supporters, or at least disclose the connection.

Kristof had left the Times in 2021 to seek the Democratic nomination for governor of Oregon, raising nearly $2.5 million before the Oregon Supreme Court unanimously upheld his exclusion from the ballot for failing to meet the state’s three-year residency requirement.

The Times’ Ethical Journalism Handbook requires staff members to avoid conduct that might “raise questions about their journalistic fairness and independence,” while also warning that political activity by a spouse or family member may create a conflict or the appearance of one.

Kristof nevertheless cited donors as authorities and promoted organizations connected to them without the promised disclosures.

He mentioned Deborah Fikes, who had given $10,000, in a 2024 column about North Korea; quoted McKinsey managing partner Bob Sternfels in a 2023 column about India without noting that Sternfels and his wife had given $5,000; and quoted the late Harvard professor Joseph Nye in columns about college admissions and China and Taiwan without mentioning Nye’s $1,000 contribution.

Larry Gilson, the founder of Focusing Philanthropy, gave $25,000 before Kristof featured the organization in his 2023, 2024 and 2025 giving guides. Vision to Learn appeared in the 2025 guide and a 2026 column even though its director, Joan Chu Reese, had donated $2,500 and Oregon Strong, the political action committee that received Kristof’s leftover campaign funds, had given the group $100,000. Kristof also wrote about CARE without disclosing that board members Michael Lynton and Richard Stengel had each contributed several thousand dollars.

Times spokesman Charlie Stadtlander told Semafor that the donations “should have been made more clear to readers.” By July, the paper had completed its review and provided Fox News with nine columns carrying fresh editor’s notes.

THE GATES EXEMPTION.

Oregon campaign-finance reporting confirms that Bill and Melinda French Gates gave Kristof $50,000 each. Semafor identified four subsequent columns in which Kristof cited Gates, his foundation, its statistics or its recommendations without mentioning that $100,000 in political support.

In “Cheer Up! The World Is Better Off Than You Think,” published in December 2022, Kristof cited Gates’s prediction that a gene-editing technique being developed for sickle-cell disease might eventually offer a cure for HIV/AIDS. In May 2023, his column on an education “revolution” in Sierra Leone highlighted Gates’s praise for education minister Moinina David Sengeh and his book, Radical Inclusion.

Four months later, Kristof’s “Coming Soon in New York: Cocktails, Steak and Hypocrisy” promoted a Gates Foundation plan that he said could save two million mothers and children over a decade. The foundation’s 2023 Goalkeepers report called for policy changes, greater investment in women’s health and more health workers, including midwives.

In December 2025, Kristof cited the Gates Foundation’s estimate that deaths among children under five had risen by more than 200,000 that year and repeated Gates’s comparison of the dead to 5,000 classrooms of children. The foundation’s 2025 report was also a policy appeal to finance Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and the Global Fund. That position ran directly against Trump administration policy: its fiscal 2026 budget proposed no money for Gavi, while Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the United States would provide no further funding unless the organization changed its approach to vaccine safety.

These were more than passing references, too. Kristof used Gates or his foundation to validate factual claims, recommend a book, support a technology forecast and advance public-policy arguments involving foreign aid. None of the four columns disclosed the donations, and none was included among the nine pieces identified by the Times after its review.

In “The World Needs More Nick Kristofs”, Gates wrote that Kristof’s 1997 reporting on childhood deaths from diarrhea gave his philanthropy a mission and helped set the direction of the Gates Foundation. He also offered a warm endorsement of Kristof’s memoir, Chasing Hope. The two, in other words, are extremely close.

LEFTOVER CAMPAIGN CASH.

In August 2022, Kristof’s campaign transferred $992,031.78 to Oregon Strong. Rolling Stone reported that nearly half of his campaign haul remained under family control and quoted Kristof saying the new organization would be nonpolitical and finance job-training programs. State filings now classify Oregon Strong as a miscellaneous PAC that is not candidate-controlled and list Elizabeth Wilson, rather than Kristof or his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, as treasurer.

The transaction ledger records no contribution to a job-training program. Instead, its principal payments were $100,000 to Vision to Learn in 2023 and $2,000 to A Progressive Voice for Oregon in 2024. As of August 4, 2026, the official account summary showed $889,626.78 in cash and no activity during 2026. Kristof told Fox that he had not been involved with Oregon Strong since 2022, had “zero plans” to seek office again and believed the questions were a bad-faith attempt to discredit his journalism.

BEYOND THE DONATIONS.

Critics have also contrasted Kristof’s favorable treatment of Gates with his writing about Jeffrey Epstein’s associates. Kristof mentioned Donald Trump’s trips aboard Epstein’s aircraft in a 2023 column, mentioned former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak at the 2025 DealBook Summit, and called for investigations of Trump and others in a February 2026 column, while acknowledging that the allegations he cited lacked evidence of wrongdoing.

But Kristof’s favorable Gates columns failed to mention Gates’s own, expansive dealings with Epstein. A Gates Foundation review identified roughly 30 meetings involving Epstein and 10 foundation leaders or staff, including Gates himself, between 2011 and 2014.

The Times’ own editor’s notes establish that its disclosure promise was repeatedly broken, but there are still questions. Why did a $1,000 donation from Joseph Nye require a correction, while $100,000 from Bill and Melinda French Gates did not? Until the newspaper explains these exceptions, its corrections address only part of the problem it acknowledged, and its credibility remains in tatters.

Next week, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee will decide whether seven still-unapproved peptides should be added to the list of substances America’s compounding pharmacies can legally use. The FDA’s own career scientists have already reviewed the evidence and recommended against it. The committee weighing that recommendation, however, is stacked with people who make money selling these peptides. The broader gray market this vote would help legitimize already includes Chinese chemical manufacturers who, until recently, were supplying the precursor chemicals behind America’s fentanyl epidemic.

CHINA’S EXPLOITATION.

Fentanyl remains the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 45, involved in roughly seven in ten of the 107,000-plus annual overdose deaths recorded at the crisis’s peak, according to the DEA. The good news is that Trump-era enforcement is working. CDC data released in May show overdose deaths falling for a third straight year, down almost 14 percent to an estimated 69,973 in 2025, with opioid deaths dropping from 55,296 to 44,564. Broken down by drug type, fentanyl and its analogues killed an estimated 38,084 Americans in 2025 alone, down from 48,913 the year before. Add those two years together and fentanyl has killed nearly 87,000 Americans since the start of 2024. That’s a body count generated year after year by a Chinese chemical industry that has treated the American public as a market to exploit rather than a nation to deal with honestly.

But when a smuggling route gets squeezed, the people running it don’t suddenly retire. They pivot. Which appears to be happening before our very eyes.

A Chainalysis investigation published in June, recently reported on by Axios, found crypto payments to gray-market peptide vendors rose from $12 million to $32 million in a single quarter, up 159 percent, pushing the sector past a $100 million annual run rate. Two of the manufacturers traced were not newcomers, either.

Shanghai Sigma Audley had operated as a fentanyl precursor supplier with documented links to darknet vendors and cartel-connected money laundering, before rebranding into weight-loss peptides using the same Chinese contact number, and shutting down altogether last September. Bigreat Technology, a supplier of precursors for fentanyl and synthetic amphetamines, spun up a shell called Zhengzhou DEPU Technology to sell peptides directly to Western buyers, laboratory unchanged. Nobody is alleging these firms shipped finished fentanyl to Baltimore. What the chain of custody record shows is precursor suppliers rebranding once the drug trade got too hot, chasing the same American money through a legal side door that draws less DEA attention (and better margins).

THE PEPTIDE BOOM.

Peptides are not inherently sinister, and some have genuine, well-studied therapeutic value. The question is who profits when Americans chase the next Ozempic-style miracle from a compounding pharmacy or telehealth site rather than a properly reviewed product, and whether Washington is about to make that shortcut easier.

Consider what the FDA has already documented about compounded GLP-1 drugs, the broader category these peptides fall into.

It has logged nearly 1,000 adverse event reports tied to compounded semaglutide and more than 730 for tirzepatide as of May, numbers it concedes are likely undercounted. It has found counterfeit product under the names of pharmacies that never made it. It has warned telehealth companies for marketing Retatrutide directly to consumers, despite the fact that Retatrutide and cagrilintide cannot legally be used in compounding at all, full stop, because neither has ever been found safe and effective for any use. Gray-market operators kept breaking the rules anyway, and patients absorbed the consequences: dosing errors, contaminated product, medicine shipped without refrigeration, and more.

Nor is a compounded medicine a generic. Generics undergo FDA review and must prove equivalence to the branded product they replace. Compounded drugs get no comparable premarket review for safety, effectiveness or quality. Compounding has a narrow, legitimate purpose, the child who cannot swallow a pill, the patient allergic to a dye, the hospital facing a genuine shortage. But it was never meant to become a parallel industry selling nationally marketed approximations of drugs nobody has approved.

The seven peptides in question, BPC-157, KPV, TB-500, MOTS-c, emideltide (also called DSIP), Semax, and Epitalon, would join the Section 503A Bulk Drug Substances List, not some blanket manufacturing license. This is not a vote to let compounders mass-manufacture peptides the way a factory runs a line; 503A covers medicines compounded for a named patient under a valid prescription. But telehealth has spent years proving how thin that line can get when the same prescription is written for tens of thousands of people who filled out nothing more than an online questionnaire.

The GLP-1 boom is the proof of concept, and widening the list hands that playbook seven new products.

The FDA’s own scientists got there first. That recommendation came from career scientists, in briefing documents posted ahead of the meeting, citing insufficient evidence of both safety and effectiveness.

But the upcoming committee meeting is not neutral.

Reporting from the Associated Press and STAT News describes it as stacked with more than half a dozen members who run peptide clinics, businesses or pharmacies, including a Tennessee state senator and pharmacist whose mother, a member of Congress, has publicly pushed the FDA to loosen peptide rules. A former FDA official who now leads the Center for Science in the Public Interest made the obvious point: a panel this weighted toward people who sell the product is poorly placed to overrule its own agency’s scientists.

None of this argues for banning peptides or treating every compounder as a front for Beijing, by the way. Washington should cut the real red tape slowing legitimate American manufacturers, and require, at minimum, that patients know the country of origin of whatever ingredient actually fills the vial, not just the pharmacy’s name on the label. Streamlining approval solves the problem.

The FDA should not open this side door to China. Its own scientists already said so. That argument gets tested in a Washington conference room in days, in front of a panel with every incentive to disagree.

Vape shops in Britain have been a rogue industry for years now, with unlicensed, unvetted proprietors selling dangerous products not just in plain sight, but radiating with the neon glow of dozens of garish window displays. In fact, 90 percent of vapes in the United Kingdom now come from China.

These are proving to pose a threat not just to public health, with teachers and healthcare workers sounding the alarm over a terrifying surge in teenage psychosis linked to illegal, often spice-laced vapes sold to minors, but to the public realm, with an unregistered vape shop in Glasgow causing a fire that gutted a 175-year-old landmark building and shut down Scotland’s largest railway station for over a week this past March.

The Government is acutely aware of the growing problems associated with vape shops. Earlier this year, Britain’s Home Office had to allocate £30 million and dozens of National Crime Agency agents and police officers to a special task force to do something about the estimated £1 billion in illicit cash laundered through vape shops and other high street businesses by organized crime. Police forces have also brought a number of cases against dubious shop owners and staff using them as bases to lure and groom children with colorful, flavored products.

So the question is, why is it still the case that anyone can open a vape shop, without a license, without an inspection, without even a background check? Why won’t the Government impose some order?

ON THE BOOKS, BUT NOT IN FORCE.

In fact, it already has. The Tobacco and Vapes Act received Royal Assent on April 29, 2026. It includes a belated but much-needed requirement for vape shop owners and their staff to acquire personal licenses and premises licenses to sell. It also bans vapes from effectively being marketed to minors with bright colors, childish branding, and synthetic flavors. Crucially, it includes a range of stringent new penalties for rogue operators who fail to abide by the new rules.

Are vape shops already a solved problem, then? No, because having a law on the books is no use if it’s not in force, and the Tobacco and Vapes Act is nowhere near being in force. Ministers have the weapons they need, but they haven’t drawn them, with license requirements and display bans not set to come into force until after a lengthy “consultation” process. Not only is this process not near completion, it still hasn’t started. It doesn’t even have a start date.

This lack of urgency is hard to understand, given the scale of the problem the country is facing. Two illegal vapes a minute are being seized nationwide, and this figure would likely be far higher if Trading Standards funding hadn’t roughly halved over the last decade, while the number of vape shops has exploded by 1,200 percent over the same period.

THE COST OF WAITING.

Every month that passes without action, the problem grows more unmanageable, and the threat to public health increases. All it takes to get a vape on a British shelf is filling in a simple online form; there’s no safety inspection, no testing, and no meaningful verification of the ingredients. Many of these products are sold to children. Researchers are increasingly finding that they are contaminated not just with illicit drugs like spice, but with dangerous, neurotoxic heavy metals like lead and cadmium.

Meanwhile, legitimate businesses are being penalized for doing things the right way. Regulated, traditional tobacconists are steadily declining, and for every new vape shop that springs up, seven licensed local pubs close down. The status quo is not tenable for business, not tenable for public health, and not tenable for the authorities struggling to keep a lid on a sector spreading too far and too fast for them to keep up with.

Ministers have the powers to tackle this. They need to use them, and they need to use them now, not years from now.

Image by Nathan Salt.

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Another week and another circus surrounds Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who has been pursued by the nation’s political, media, and parliamentary establishments over private gifts he received, prior to becoming a Member of Parliament, as well as money he has earned being a spokesman for a gold bullion company.

The press has hounded him for months, and this weekend saw the final straw for Farage, as Sky News journalists turned up at his daughter’s house while he was in the United States celebrating America’s 250th anniversary with the Vice President and Trump cabinet officials.

Much like the circus of cases against President Trump, the allegations against Farage are entirely baseless. At worst, they accuse him of failing to file some paperwork. For such a heinous error, the establishment claims, Farage should lose his parliamentary seat.

“Enough is enough,” was Farage’s response on Tuesday. Instead of letting the media harass him and his family every day, he has decided to resign his seat in parliament voluntarily, in advance of any formal parliamentary rebuke (a set up to chide him and take his seat away, regardless of guilt or innocence), and fight a by-election (special election) to defend it.

In other words: let the people decide.

“If I win, you win,” he told the voters of his constituency in Clacton-on-Sea yesterday. “If I lose, they win,” he concluded, pointing to a political establishment that includes the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, the Green Party, the Liberal Democrats, and even the recently constituted “Restore Britain,” which enjoys the backing of trillionaire Elon Musk, and openly takes its cues from the center-left “Conservative” Party.

But so far, every party, Restore included, has said they refuse to fight against Farage in Clacton.

Firstly, he’s far too popular there, and that’s why they’re really afraid. Clacton is one of the most white, working-class, pro-Brexit seats in the country. Labour would stand no chance, the Tories would get shellacked, and Restore in its current state of “are we or aren’t we ethnonationalists?” would likely end up fighting amongst itself more than anyone else.

Secondly, none of these parties actually care about the voting public having a say in any of this. They’d prefer to litigate against Farage in kangaroo courts and closed committees, as has been the case so far. Asking ordinary people to have a say!? How detestful!

ENTER ‘COUNT BINFACE.’

It strikes me as remarkably appropriate that all these parties have now stood aside to let a joke candidate stand against Farage in Clacton – a Monty Python-style sketch character who has stood against Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson, and even in the London Mayoral race.

In fact, it is even more appropriate that the representative of the establishment regime is a bin, or “trash can.”

While Westminster thinks its hilarious that Farage’s political future rests on him beating a caricature, it strikes ordinary voters as contemptuous and insulting.

The man behind the mask is Jonathan David Harvey, an almost 50-year-old comedian who has made most of his earnings from working with the globalist, TV license-funded British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

Far from his irreverent stage persona, Harvey is a liberal Oxford graduate who loathes working class voters, Brexit, and takes himself very seriously as an actor and writer, despite his own webpage being blank on the writing section.

For Americans, Binface is something like Vermin Supreme, but without the political conviction.

In British politics, however, ridicule can be a lethal weapon.

With the rest of the parties too afraid to stand against Farage, an unholy alliance on Count Binface voters is likely to return the character the most votes he’s ever had, though the idea of him cobbling together the 21,000+ he’d need to beat Farage in the special election is highly unlikely.

Instead, Farage is likely to be returned as the Clacton MP once again. A poke in the eye for a political establishment that will no doubt try to remove him yet again, in just a few months, when their pre-scripted, weaponized report against his private finances emerges.

When Donald Trump calls Comcast “Concast,” he is making a specific allegation about one of the most powerful media companies in the world: that it presents political hostility as journalism. Sky News (known by many as “Sly News”) which is owned by Comcast, recently denied hounding Reform UK leader Nigel Farage’s daughter at her house, before being caught out lying by CCTV footage. The network has now admitted its reporters had indeed approached the property.

Trump has repeatedly gone after Comcast and its chairman, Brian Roberts, by name. In February 2025, he accused MSNBC of being “an illegal arm of the Democrat Party” and referred to Roberts as the “Lowlife Chairman of ‘Concast.’” He has also blasted Comcast, NBC, and Roberts as a disgrace to broadcasting. The language is Trump’s, but the underlying point is one many conservatives have understood for years: large corporate broadcasters now behave like political actors while demanding the deference once given to neutral institutions.

They also feel like they can turn up at politicians’ doors, but be exempt from the same treatment themselves. Something which has to change.

CONCAST OWNS SLY NEWS.

Comcast bought Sky in 2018 after a bidding war with 21st Century Fox, paying about £30.6 billion. The deal gave the Philadelphia-based media and telecoms giant control of Sky’s television, broadband, mobile, streaming, entertainment, sports, and news operations.

The ownership chain is simple enough. Sky News is owned by Sky Group. Sky Group is owned by Comcast. Comcast is chaired and controlled by Brian L. Roberts.

Comcast’s political operation is not especially subtle, either. The company has long maintained a major Washington presence. David Cohen, one of the most politically connected figures in Comcast’s orbit, served for years as Comcast’s chief lobbyist and senior executive vice president. Before Comcast, he was chief of staff to Ed Rendell in Philadelphia. Later, Joe Biden made him U.S. ambassador to Canada.

British viewers who still think of Sky as a purely British broadcaster are looking at an old map.

THE RHODES CONNECTION.

Sky News Group is chaired by David Rhodes, an American media executive featured by the World Economic Forum. Rhodes happens to be the brother of Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s former advisor, who has his own public history of hostility toward Farage.

In 2017, Ben Rhodes compared Farage to Putin-aligned critics of NATO and the EU, writing: “Like Putin, Trump and Bannon have talked down NATO / the EU, lifted up EU critics like Farage, worried leaders like Tusk and Merkel.” The following year, replying to the Labour Party’s David Lammy, he wrote: “Perhaps Farage could just go to Moscow so that he can take his instructions directly.”

Rhodes was caught publicly mourning the loss of Hillary Clinton in 2016, who herself attacked Farage after he appeared on the campaign trail with then-candidate Trump in Jackson, Mississippi, making him one of the first major global leaders to back the 45th and 47th President.

So the man overseeing Comcast-owned Sky News is not even a product of the old British broadcasting world, but of the left-wing American media establishment. His politically prominent brother has openly treated Farage with hostility.

When Sky News is caught out over Farage’s family, it is not paranoia to ask whether Britain’s supposedly neutral broadcaster is operating inside a much wider American establishment culture that has viewed Farage as an enemy for years.

THE LIE UNRAVELS.

The Farage row matters because it shows the culture problem in plain sight. First came the denial. Then came the later disclosure. Then came the studio defence that doorstepping is just normal journalism. Well, perhaps it is “normal” journalism. That is the indictment.

The press spends half its time demanding transparency from everyone else while hiding behind evasive corporate wording when the questions turn inward. Sky’s own statement may have been narrowly constructed, but the wider public heard what we heard: you said you had not contacted his family, then we learned reporters had indeed pulled up at the property, blocked the driveway, and attempted to contact his daughter inside.

🚨NEW: Nigel Farage has released CCTV footage of Sky News journalists turning up at the door of his daughters home

He is demanding an apology pic.twitter.com/EIotl9XJe1

— GB Politics (@GBPolitcs) July 7, 2026

If a politician tried that kind of parsing, Sky News would devote a panel to it before lunch. Which brings us back to “Concast.”

Trump’s critique has always been that these companies are not merely biased in the old-fashioned sense. His argument is that they are protected political institutions: wealthy, corporate, self-regarding, and convinced that their own intrusions are public service while everyone else’s complaints are threats to press freedom.

Sky’s handling of the Farage doorstep row looks like a British exhibit in the same case.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Consumers can stop paying Comcast and its subsidiaries, now.

In Britain, that means cancelling Sky TV, Sky Sports, Sky Cinema, Sky Broadband, Sky Mobile, and NOW (formerly NOW TV). It means refusing the little retention discount when the call centre tries to save the subscription. It means telling Sky, in writing, that the cancellation is because of Sky News and its handling of the Farage family row. It means not feeding Sky News clips on social media where outrage still counts as engagement.

There is also the regulatory route. Viewers can complain to Ofcom if they believe Sky breached broadcasting standards. But companies understand revenue faster than they understand public anger.

Trump called it “Concast” because he believed Comcast had become a byword for corporate media corruption dressed up as public interest journalism. After this week, plenty of British viewers may finally understand the nickname.

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WATCH:

A BIG FAT GIANT BACKPEDAL FROM SKY NEWS just now, as they final admit that yes, they did hound Nigel Farage’s daughter at a property The Times revealed last week was her residence.

This is ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING. Watch as Adam Boulton pivots from their line of “Nah we didn’t do… pic.twitter.com/bXTV1suQiU

— Raheem J. Kassam (@RaheemKassam) July 7, 2026

2025 was one of the worst years for farmers in years with bankruptcies skyrocketing by 46% from 2024 levels.

Prices are down, costs kept climbing. Some of that traces back to trade disruptions with China, though rising input costs are just as much to blame. Things like fertilizer, fuel, machinery, costs more than half what it did in 2011. Meanwhile the price farmers are receiving when they sell has only increased by 21% in that same stretch. Do that math for yourself.

Farmers needed help fast, so the Trump administration announced $12 billion in bridge payments to farmers to help them be able to plant their crops this year. It’s a lifeline for thousands of small family farms. Nobody’s arguing otherwise and the Trump Administration did the correct thing by cutting the checks.

But here’s the problem: Bailouts like this don’t fix anything for next year. They just cover this year’s losses. Whatever caused the drop, weather, higher fuel and fertilizer costs, oversupply, a trade war with China, doesn’t really matter. The fix is always the same: another check, funded by taxpayers.

But there’s a bill sitting in Congress that could make the whole cycle unnecessary going forward. It’s called the Grown in America Act.

It doesn’t ask for more checks to be cut, but creates a new incentive structure that boosts America’s family farms by pointing our tax code in a different direction.

Here is how it works: American companies get a tax credit if they buy their ingredients from American farmers. The credit kicks in once half of what they buy is American-grown, and the credit increases from there as they buy even American grown products. Buy foreign instead, and the company gets nothing.

There’s no government check involved at all, no emergency, just a standing reason for companies to keep buying American, built straight into the tax code, whether there’s a crisis that month or not.

A tax credit costs the government money too. There’s no getting around that. But it’s a cost built into the budget ahead of time, not an emergency expense the government has to scramble to cover.

Yet even more importantly we are fixing a broken system that jumps from one emergency bailout to the next to creating a customer for American family farms who keeps showing up.

Congress should pass it. Trump’s already bailed farmers out once since December 2025. He shouldn’t have to do it again just because Congress can’t get a tax bill across the finish line.

Give farmers a customer instead of a check, feed America with American grown agriculture and create a whole new incentive structure that allows American family farms to thrive year after year.