Category: Entertainment

MIL-OSI USA: PHILADELPHIA – Governor Shapiro to Highlight Impact of His Administration’s Violence Intervention and Prevention Program, Work to Make Pennsylvania Communities Safer

Source: US State of Pennsylvania

August 01, 2025 – Philadelphia, PA

ADVISORY – PHILADELPHIA – Governor Shapiro to Highlight Impact of His Administration’s Violence Intervention and Prevention Program, Work to Make Pennsylvania Communities Safer

Governor Josh Shapiro will join Representative Amen Brown and local community leaders to visit Philadelphia’s Community Education Center where he will meet with young people and teachers participating in Beyond the Bars, a student-driven and community-based initiative that uses music education to interrupt cycles of violence. Thanks to the Governor’s work to increase funding for the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency (PCCD)’s Violence Intervention and Prevention (VIP) program, Beyond the Bars has been able to expand its reach and positively impact more young Pennsylvanians.

Grants through the VIP program contributed to Philadelphia’s significant reductions in gun violence last year, among the largest decreases https://www.americanprogress.org/article/early-2024-data-show-promising-signs-of-another-historic-decline-in-gun-violence/in major U.S. cities in 2024.

WHO:
Governor Josh Shapiro
Representative Amen Brown, 10th Legislative District
Matt Kerr, Executive Director, Beyond the Bars
Isaiah Robinson, Student Teacher Lead & Lead Facilitator, Beyond the Bars

WHEN:
Friday, August 1, 2025 at 11:00 AM

WHERE:
Community Education Center
3500 Lancaster Ave,
Philadelphia, PA 19104

LIVE STREAM:
pacast.com/live/gov
governor.pa.gov/live/

RSVP:
Press who are interested in attending must RSVP with the names and phone numbers for each member of their team to ra-gvgovpress@pa.gov.

MIL OSI USA News –

August 5, 2025
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MIL OSI Economics –
August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI USA: ICYMI: On Bloomberg TV’s Balance of Power, Shaheen Details Her Senate Floor Effort to Block Trump Tariff Taxes from Taking Effect, Highlights Trade War Harms to Families and Businesses
US Senate News:
Source: United States Senator for New Hampshire Jeanne Shaheen

(Washington, DC) – U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a top member of the U.S. Senate Small Business Committee, joined Bloomberg TV’s Balance of Power last night to discuss her Senate floor effort to block President Trump’s tariffs from taking effect on August 1 and lead her colleagues in detailing the real harm the Administration’s trade war causes to American families and businesses. Shaheen relayed the concerns she heard from Granite State small businesses during recent visits about the high costs, uncertainty and supply chain challenges posed by the President’s trade war.

Click HERE to watch Senator Shaheen’s full interview.

Key quotes from Senator Shaheen:
- “I went to the floor several months ago with the same unanimous consent request for legislation that I’ve introduced, and the Republican majority objected to that – but I think it’s important to continue to raise the concern. Because every business that I visit in New Hampshire has expressed concern about the tariffs.”
- “The other thing that I’ve heard from literally every business that I’ve visited is that, as much of a problem as the high tariffs are and the increases in cost, it’s the uncertainty that it means for their business. Because they don’t know what the President’s gonna do. […] So, businesses don’t know how to invest, they don’t know how to plan – and that creates real problems for businesses and the people who work there.”
- “We just had a hearing in Foreign Relations today on critical minerals in Africa, and the fact that we’re not producing those critical minerals in the United States that we need for the auto industry, for our appliances and virtually everything we do. So we need to do that, but these tariffs aren’t going to help us with those critical minerals. We need to make some of those investments, and we need to have a strategy to do that.”
Following the interview, Shaheen took to the Senate floor to call for unanimous consent to pass her Protecting Americans from Tax Hikes on Imported Goods Act and highlight the devastating impacts the trade war has on families, small businesses, American manufacturing and key trade partnerships across the world. If Senate Republicans had not blocked the move, Shaheen’s legislation would have clarified that the President does not have the authority to invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to level sweeping tariffs.

Click HERE to watch Shaheen’s remarks in full.

Senator Shaheen is helping lead efforts in Congress to mitigate the harmful impacts of President Trump’s tariffs. Last week, Shaheen helped introduce bipartisan legislation, Creating Access to Necessary American-Canadian Duty Adjustments (CANADA) Act, that would exempt United States-owned small businesses from the sweeping tariffs imposed on Canadian products. Last month, Shaheen led 30 Senators in filing an amicus brief in a key case, Oregon v. Department of Homeland Security, challenging the Trump Administration’s abuse of emergency powers to impose tariffs. In January, Shaheen introduced the Protecting Americans from Tax Hikes on Imported Goods Act.

In recent months, Shaheen has traveled across the Granite State to discuss the impact of tariffs on New Hampshire’s tourism industry and to visit businesses impacted by President Trump’s trade war including Brueckner Group USA, Colby Footwear, Chatila’s Bakery, C&J, DCI Furniture, Mount Cabot Maple, American Calan Inc. and NH Ball Bearings.
MIL OSI USA News –
August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI USA: Senator Baldwin Releases Statement on Bipartisan Bill to Fund Labor, Health, and Education Departments for Fiscal Year 2026
US Senate News:
Source: United States Senator for Wisconsin Tammy Baldwin

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Ranking Member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health, and Human Services, released the following statement after the full committee advanced her Fiscal Year 2026 funding legislation to the Senate floor. In addition to funding critical programs that the Trump Administration has tried to cut or withhold funding from – including Head Start, the National Institutes of Health, and Job Corps – the bipartisan bill takes further steps to mandate the timely delivery of Congressionally approved funding and adequate staffing levels at federal agencies to carry out the mission of these programs.

“At the end of the day, my North Star is delivering for the people of Wisconsin. While no one got everything they wanted in this bill, I’m proud to say we found common ground and are doing just that to address the challenges facing working families across the country. From investing in cancer and Alzheimer’s research, to protecting the Department of Education and early education funding, to strengthening my 988 Suicide Lifeline, we came together to deliver for our constituents,” said Senator Baldwin. “This bill not only puts Donald Trump’s budget in the trash, it also reins in this President’s efforts to dismantle and withhold funding for critical programs our constituents rely on. This bill takes on the kitchen table issues families face by addressing childcare costs, connecting more Americans with good-paying jobs, and taking on the mental health and opioid epidemics. While it is not perfect, I look forward to getting it over the finish line on behalf of Wisconsinites who want to see a Washington that works for them.”

As Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Labor, Health, and Human Services, Senator Baldwin writes the bill that funds the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. A summary of the bill is available below.

Key Points & Highlights – Department of Health and Human Services

Department of Health and Human Services (HHS): The bill provides $116.6 billion, an increase of $446 million in discretionary funding for the Department of Health and Human Services over fiscal year 2025.

The bill rejects the Trump administration’s harmful efforts to defund and dismantle critical work that HHS oversees—maintaining important funding for programs across HHS that touch the lives of nearly every American, while providing targeted increases to important bipartisan priorities. The bill includes new requirements to help ensure adequate staffing and the timely awarding of funding to prevent completely unnecessary delays and disruptions in programs that families and communities across the country count on—from child care and Head Start to substance use and mental health—and that support lifesaving research into cures and treatments for devastating diseases.

Biomedical Research: The bill provides $48.7 billion in discretionary funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—an increase of $400 million to propel lifesaving and life-changing cures and treatments across NIH’s 27 institutes and centers and the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H).

The bill rejects the catastrophic 40% cut to NIH proposed by President Trump, and instead of slashing funding for biomedical research, includes a:
- $150 million increase for cancer research;
- $100 million increase for Alzheimer’s disease research;
- $30 million increase for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases;
- $30 million increase for the Office of Research on Women’s Health;
- $25 million increase for ALS research, fully funding the $100 million as authorized by the ACT for ALS Act of 2021;
- $20 million increase for the IMPROVE Initiative for research on maternal mortality;
- $12 million increase for BRAIN Initiative research;
- $10 million increase for diabetes research;
- $10 million increase for rare disease research;
- $9 million increase for the Undiagnosed Diseases Network; and a
- $5 million to implement the National Parkinson’s Project.
The bill also rejects the Trump administration’s proposal—and illegal efforts—to cap indirect cost rates at 15%, which would devastate biomedical research, and continues a longstanding provision that prohibits NIH from implementing such a cap. The bill also rejects the Trump administration’s misguided elimination of programs across NIH by maintaining funding for HIV vaccine research, training programs that support the next generation of researchers, and the Safe to Sleep campaign, among others.

The bill also includes, as part of a manager’s amendment, a new provision that would prevent implementation of the Office of Management and Budget’s misguided policy for NIH to fund significantly more of its multi-year research grants in one lump sum. This poorly thought-out new policy would significantly cut the number of research grants NIH awards this year and next year—according to NIH’s own estimate, by 40% in fiscal year 2025, reducing the percentage of cancer research grants it will award from 13% to 7%, and Alzheimer’s disease grants from 18% to 6%. OMB’s attempt this week to explicitly and illegally withhold billions in funding and halt all remaining NIH research grants through the rest of the year makes its intentions crystal clear. More needs to be done to protect NIH research programs, but the provision included in this bill is an important step in preventing the Trump administration from decimating the biomedical research enterprise Congress has built in a bipartisan manner over decades, which has long been the envy of the world and drives medical innovation that has saved millions of lives.

The bill also includes a new authority for NIH to address loopholes in sexual harassment reporting and strengthen accountability by requiring institutions to complete investigations into concerns about harassment, bullying, retaliation, or hostile working conditions, even if the alleged perpetrator leaves their current position and is no longer employed by the institution. It provides the NIH Director the authority to decline the transfer of an award to a different institution, helping to close the “pass-the-harasser” loophole. It also provides the NIH Director the authority to share investigation reports on an as-needed basis with any institution that receives NIH funding.

Child Care and Early Learning Programs: The bill includes $8.8 billion for the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG)—an $85 million increase over fiscal year 2025; and $12.4 billion for Head Start, an $85 million increase. Much more needs to be done to address our broken child care system and ensure every working family can find and afford child care, which is critical for businesses and our economy too—but sustained annual increases in these programs are critical in the meantime. The bill also sustains funding for Preschool Development Grants, which President Trump proposed eliminating in his budget request.

Addressing Substance Use Disorders and Mental Health: The bill sustains funding to address the rising toll of opioid overdoses fueled by fentanyl, maintain access to substance use disorder prevention and treatment, and improve access to mental health services.

The bill rejects President Trump’s proposed cuts to SAMHSA programs and maintains SAMHSA as its own, independent agency to ensure substance use and mental health remain a priority at HHS. The bill includes targeted increases to SAMHSA programs, including $2.0 billion, a $20 million increase over fiscal year 2025, for the Substance Use Prevention, Treatment, and Recovery Services Block Grant; $1.6 billion for State Opioid Response grants, a $20 million increase; and $145 million for the Rural Communities Opioid Response Program.

It protects key investments in mental health programs by sustaining funding for the Mental Health Block Grant, Project AWARE, Mental Health Awareness Training, and the National Childhood Traumatic Stress Network. The bill also provides $535 million, a $15 million increase over fiscal year 2025, for the 988 Suicide Prevention Lifeline, to address continued increases in demand as 988 has been stood up over the last several years, and it restores dedicated funding for the LGBTQ+ youth specialized services line that President Trump eliminated this summer.

Additionally, it includes approximately $180 million in investments within the Department of Education to address the shortage of school-based mental health professionals and services in our nation’s K-12 schools.

Essential Health Care Programs: The bill protects investments in health care access and affordability and the health care workforce—maintaining investments in core programs, including $1.86 billion for Community Health Centers and $128.6 million for the National Health Service Corps. The United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) is fully funded, and the bill affirms support for the mission and scientific integrity of the task force. The bill also includes a $9.3 million increase in rural health programs to boost recruitment of health care providers to practice in rural areas and support rural hospitals.

Importantly, the bill provides a $5 million increase in funding for the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) Modernization Initiative to strengthen and reform the nation’s organ donation and transplant system. There are more than 100,000 individuals on the organ transplant waitlist, and this initiative, which began during the Biden administration, will allow the OPTN to better serve patients and families and strengthen accountability.

Public Health: The bill rejects the approximately $4 billion—or 50%—cut to CDC programs proposed by President Trump’s budget request. CDC helps keep Americans safe and healthy by protecting against diseases and supporting states and local communities as they do the same. It also rejects the Trump administration’s haphazard proposal to dismantle CDC, which risks Americans’ health and safety, and requires HHS to support staffing levels to carry out the CDC’s programs.

The bill also helps support state and local health departments by sustaining critical programs across the CDC, including funding for chronic diseases, the Office of Smoking and Health, injury prevention programs (including firearm injury and mortality research), global health programs, and immunization and infectious disease prevention programs.

HIV/AIDS: The bill includes $613 million for the Ending the HIV Epidemic Initiative, which provides high-need jurisdictions with prevention and treatment services for people at high risk for HIV transmission. This includes $220 million within the CDC’s Domestic HIV/AIDS Prevention and Research programs to develop and deploy innovative data management solutions, increase access to PrEP, and better detect and respond to HIV clusters, and $128.9 million for the CDC’s global HIV/AIDS program. The bill also provides full funding for the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program, including dental services and training for health care practitioners, two initiatives that President Trump sought to eliminate in his budget proposal.

Women’s Health: The bill sustains funding for reproductive health programs, including Title X and the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, which President Trump eliminated in his budget proposal. The bill also increases investments in maternal health across CDC and NIH with a $53 million increase for programs that aim to address maternal mental health, prevent pregnancy-related deaths, support best practices to improve maternal health outcomes, and invest in women’s health research. The bill also provides funding for a new initiative to support survivors of sexual assault and creates a new menopause initiative within AHRQ to translate research best practices into clinical practice for women. Importantly, the bill includes increases in funding for the Maternal Mental Health Hotline and maternal health safety initiatives through the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health program.

Pandemic Preparedness and Biodefense: The bill includes $3.6 billion for the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR). It sustains funding for the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA); Project Bioshield; the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS); and Industrial Base Management and Supply Chain (IBMSC) activities to help ensure that critical resources in the public health supply chain—including raw materials, medical countermeasures, and ancillary supplies—are manufactured in the United States. It also includes $4 million to support a new program to improve emergency medical services and trauma care during a public health emergency.

Administration for Community Living: The bill maintains funding for the Administration for Community Living as its own agency within HHS to help support seniors and Americans with disabilities so they can live and participate fully in their communities. This includes providing $1.1 billion for senior nutrition programs and providing targeted increases for family caregiver programs.

Home Heating and Cooling Assistance: The bill includes $4.045 billion for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), a $20 million increase over fiscal year 2025, to help low-income households heat and cool their homes.

Key Points & Highlights – Department of Education

Department of Education: The bill provides $79.0 billion in discretionary funding for the Department of Education.

The bill rejects the Trump administration’s call to eliminate the Department of Education and maintains funding across the Department, including funding for K-12 formula and competitive grant programs, CTE and adult education programs, federal student aid, postsecondary competitive grants, and civil rights enforcement to provide the resources needed to help schools improve educational outcomes for students and protect all students from discrimination.

The bill includes new requirements that the Department of Education maintain the staff necessary to ensure it carries out its statutory responsibilities, including carrying out programs and activities funded in this bill in a timely manner. The bill also includes new requirements for the Department of Education to make formula grants available to states and districts on time. While this should be unnecessary, this step prevents any administration from withholding key funding for students and creating chaos for states and schools, which distracts educators from helping kids thrive.

Supporting Elementary and Secondary Education Students: The bill strengthens investments in foundational formula grant programs for elementary and secondary education and in public schools, teachers, and students—rejecting the $4.5 billion cut and the proposed consolidations in President Trump’s budget request for a new $2 billion block grant program.

The bill boosts funding for Title I-A grants by $50 million above the fiscal year 2025 level to $18.457 billion. More than 80% of the nation’s school districts receive these funds, and nearly 25 million students go to schools receiving Title I funding. The bill also provides $15.224 billion, an increase of $50 million over fiscal year 2025, for all three IDEA Special Education State grant programs and retains each as a separate program. IDEA state grant programs support more than seven million students and children with disabilities and their families who receive IDEA services through these programs. The bill also includes new guardrails to prevent the administration from moving these formula grant programs to other federal agencies and disrupting the efficient and effective use of federal funds intended to improve outcomes for students.

The bill also continues current investments, except for a few targeted reductions, across a range of other important formula and competitive grant programs authorized to improve teaching and learning in elementary and secondary schools, rejecting President Trump’s proposed elimination of $1.5 billion in total funding for nine important programs.

Career and Technical Education (CTE): The bill provides $1.45 billion for CTE grants and $729 million for adult education grants and appropriates such funding to the Department of Education to carry out these programs, rejecting President Trump’s call to eliminate federal support for adult education. The bill includes new provisions requiring both CTE and adult education formula grants to be awarded in a timely way to prevent any administration from withholding these critical funds.

Higher Education: The bill provides a total maximum Pell Grant award of $7,395 for the 2026-2027 award year, rejecting President Trump’s proposal to cut the Pell grant by over $1000. This coming school year, Pell Grants are expected to help over 7 million students at all stages of life pursue postsecondary education and further their careers. The bill also rejects President Trump’s proposals to eliminate a range of postsecondary education programs.

Instead, the bill sustains funding for Federal Work Study and the Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant that provide additional need-based aid to students to help them afford postsecondary education. The bill also includes $65 million for the Teacher Quality Partnership program and $15 million for the Hawkins Centers of Excellence to help educator preparation programs address educator shortages. It also continues other investments available to recruit, develop, and retain an effective and diverse teacher and school leader workforce, including $90 million for the Supporting Effective Educator Development program.

The bill sustains funding for TRIO at $1.191 billion; $388 million for GEAR UP; $75 million for the Child Care Access Means Parents in School Program (CCAMPIS); a $10 million for the Basic Needs Program; and $40 million for the Postsecondary Student Success Grant Program to help students prepare for and succeed in post-secondary education. The bill also sustains funding for Title III and V programs that support HBCUs, MSIs, Tribal colleges, and other institutions. President Trump had proposed to eliminate CCAMPIS, TRIO, GEAR UP, International Education, the Basic Needs Program, and the Postsecondary Student Success Grant, among other programs in his budget request.

The bill also sustains funding for the administration of student aid programs. This funding supports a wide range of activities, including: implementing the FAFSA; disbursing student aid; ensuring services are available to student loan borrowers; implementing more affordable repayment plans; and fixing longstanding issues in student loan forgiveness programs. Finally, the bill includes important requirements to help Congress conduct oversight over the new higher education provisions contained in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Protecting Students from Discrimination: The bill rejects President Trump’s proposed cut of $49 million, or one-third of the total budget, for the Office for Civil Rights. Instead, the bill maintains the current budget level of $140 million and requires the Department to support the staffing levels necessary for OCR to fulfill its statutory responsibilities.

Advancing Education Research, Statistics, and Assessments: The bill maintains current funding of $793 million for the Institute of Education Sciences for all programs and activities of IES funded in fiscal year 2024, rejecting the massive reduction of $532 million or 67% proposed in President Trump’s budget request. The Trump administration’s significant workforce reductions and program delays at IES this year have caused it to fail to meet statutory requirements. The bill requires the Department to support staffing levels necessary for IES and the National Center for Education Statistics to fulfill their statutory responsibilities.

Key Points & Highlights – Department of Labor

Department of Labor (DOL): The bill includes $13.7 billion in discretionary funding for the Department of Labor. The bill rejects the harmful cuts proposed by the Trump administration, including the administration’s proposal to block grant our nation’s workforce training programs.

Workforce Development: The bill includes $2.9 billion for Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) formula grants, protecting essential investments made in recent years. It includes a new directive requiring DOL to award such funds in a timely manner. It provides $285 million for Registered Apprenticeships and $105 million for YouthBuild. The bill also rejects President Trump’s call to eliminate Job Corps and instead provides $1.76 billion for Job Corps. Rejecting President Trump’s proposed cuts for many of these programs and continuing funding for these key workforce development programs will help grow the economy, provide workers with the skills they need to secure good-paying jobs of the future, and help American businesses compete globally.

Worker Protection: The bill rejects drastic reductions proposed in President Trump’s request and sustains key investments in DOL’s worker protection agencies charged with enforcing requirements for employers to pay workers what they earn and provide safe and healthy workplaces. The bill maintains $191 million in funding for the Employee Benefits Security Administration, which is responsible for, among other things, ensuring private sector employment-based group health plans comply with mental health and substance use disorder parity requirements. The bill also maintains $260 million for Wage and Hour Division to support the Division’s work to recover wages workers are owed and to combat exploitative child labor. Last year, the Division secured more than $273 million in back wages collected and damages for nearly 152,000 workers nationwide.

The bill also provides $111 million, $41 million more than President Trump’s budget request, for the Bureau of International Labor Affairs to enforce labor provisions of free trade agreements and trade preference programs and combat international child labor and forced labor. Finally, the bill rejects the proposed elimination of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs and Women’s Bureau, providing $106 million and $23 million, respectively.

Key Points & Highlights – Related Agencies

Social Security Administration (SSA): The bill includes $15.0 billion for SSA’s administrative expenses—an increase of $594 million over fiscal year 2025. This is $100 million more than President Trump’s budget request to help address staffing challenges and improve service to the public. The Trump administration has single-handedly created completely unnecessary chaos at SSA that has weakened Americans’ ability to get the benefits they are owed—and it has continually misled the public with easily disproven claims about widespread fraud. Instead of admitting to its lie, SSA has doubled down and pursued poorly planned and implemented policy changes. The American public and the beneficiaries SSA serves have paid the price, with unacceptable wait times to access the benefits and services Americans deserve, and that they have literally earned through a lifetime of work. Instead of chasing conspiracy theories, the administration should focus on actually improving services and addressing service delivery challenges impacting Americans across the country. The resources in this bill will help SSA do just that.

AmeriCorps: The bill rejects President Trump’s elimination of AmeriCorps and sustains funding for all of AmeriCorps’ grant programs by providing a total of $1.25 billion to the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) to administer these programs. This bill also includes new provisions requiring any administration to award AmeriCorps state formula funding in a timely way and includes new requirements to ensure CNCS will award competitive grants in a timely fashion, too. The bill will support AmeriCorps members serving in communities across the country and working to address pressing challenges, including responding to natural disasters, assisting in schools, supporting our veterans, promoting economic opportunity, and conserving and protecting the environment.

Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB): As a result of Congressional Republicans’ approval of the Rescissions Act of 2025—the first ever partisan rescissions bill signed into law—no funds are provided in the bill for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the more than 1,500 locally owned public TV and radio stations nationwide that have, for over 50 years, been supported by CPB funds and infrastructure investments. Republicans’ devastating rescissions bill will particularly hurt 120 stations that rely on CPB for more than 25% of their revenue, who are now scrambling to find new sources of support or significantly reduce programming or close in the coming months.

Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS): The bill continues to invest $295 million in the nation’s libraries and museums through programs of the Institute of Museum and Library Services and requires IMLS to fund specified programs and activities at amounts identified in the Committee report.
MIL OSI USA News –
August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI: CLEAR Joins White House and CMS Effort to Power an Interoperable, Secure Digital Health Ecosystem
Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

NEW YORK, July 31, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — CLEAR (NYSE: YOU), the secure identity platform, is participating in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Health Tech Ecosystem initiative, a nationwide effort to deliver a more connected, patient-centered healthcare system.

CLEAR was proud to stand alongside government, healthcare, and technology leaders at the White House this week to support the launch of this national collaboration, and to reinforce its role as the trusted, full service Identity Assurance Level 2 (IAL2)/Authenticator Assurance Level 2 (AAL2) identity layer underpinning partner ecosystems across healthcare.

“CLEAR applauds the Administration’s commitment to accelerating the digital transformation of healthcare and is proud to be a trusted partner in this nationwide effort,” said Caryn Seidman Becker, CEO of CLEAR. “By serving as an IAL2 identity layer in healthcare ecosystems, CLEAR is helping to kill the clipboard, eliminate friction, and give patients control of their medical information in a secure, seamless way. We believe identity is the key to unlocking personalized, efficient, and patient-centered care.”

At the heart of this CMS-led effort is a push to make health data more accessible, interoperable, and actionable, empowering patients, reducing provider burden, and improving outcomes. CLEAR’s reusable identity platform for healthcare organizations and businesses, CLEAR1, is already enabling this transformation across leading platforms and health systems, including Epic, Surescripts, Wellstar, Community Health Network, University of Miami Health and b.well.

These partners are leveraging CLEAR1 for use cases such as streamlining patient onboarding and check-in, enhancing workforce security, simplifying access to medical records, and strengthening data protection. Together, these efforts demonstrate how secure, interoperable identity can reduce friction, lower costs, and enable a more connected healthcare experience.

CLEAR1 is a NIST IAL2/AAL2-compliant identity solution that gives patients and providers a reusable, privacy-centric credential to unlock services across the care journey, whether creating a MyChart account, verifying coverage, or accessing claims data.

Over 60 companies have signed on to the CMS Health Tech Ecosystem pledge, committing to advance tools that:
- Help patients manage chronic conditions like diabetes and obesity
- Use AI assistants to navigate symptoms and schedule care
- “Kill the clipboard” by digitizing check-in and intake
- Securely share data across trusted networks using modern identity credentials
“We are excited that identity services – like CLEAR – are making it possible for patients and providers to use verified, secure identity as part of CMS’s Health Tech Ecosystem,” said Amy Gleason, Acting Administrator for the U.S. DOGE Service and Strategic Advisor to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. “Checking in at the doctor’s office should be the same as boarding a flight. Patients should be able to scan a QR code to instantly and safely share their identity, insurance and medical history”.

“Our work with CLEAR has meaningfully improved the speed and reliability of provider identity verification across our network,” said Frank Harvey, CEO of Surescripts. “It’s a powerful example of how focused collaboration can drive real progress. This pledge builds on that momentum—demonstrating how innovators across healthcare are advancing interoperability to reduce administrative burden and refocus clinicians’ time where it matters most: patient care.”

“Identity is foundational to creating the connected, consumer-first healthcare experience that people expect, and it’s what b.well was built to deliver,” said Kristen Valdes, CEO and Founder of b.well. “Our partnership with CLEAR brings a trusted, IAL2-compliant identity layer into that experience, giving patients and caregivers a seamless, unified way to access and share their health information across providers and platforms.”

“As part of our pledge to become a CMS Aligned Network, our relationship and planned integration with CLEAR will give us a unique opportunity to bring IAL2 identity verification to providers who are newer to the interoperability space,” said Therasa Bell, President and Founder of Kno2. “That includes nurses, physical therapists, behavioral health providers, dentists, and paramedics, and it will enable them to securely communicate and share patient records across the broader healthcare ecosystem.”

“Modern identity is the key to enabling safe, secure, and trusted data exchange across healthcare,” said Aneesh Chopra, former Chief Technology Officer of the United States. “CLEAR’s work to deliver IAL2-compliant digital identity helps unlock the promise of interoperability—giving patients and providers the confidence to share information seamlessly and securely.”

CLEAR1 is already powering many of these functions across CLEAR’s health, financial services, and workforce partners—and stands ready to support the rollout of CMS-Aligned Networks in 2026 and beyond.

About CLEAR
CLEAR’s mission is to strengthen security and create frictionless experiences. With over 31 million Members and a growing network of partners across the world, CLEAR’s secure identity platform is transforming the way people live, work, and travel. Whether you are traveling, at the stadium, or on your phone, CLEAR connects you to the things that make you, you – making everyday experiences easier, more secure, and friction-free. CLEAR is committed to privacy done right. Members are always in control of their own information, and we never sell Member data. For more information, visit clearme.com.

Forward-Looking Statements
This release may contain statements that constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. This includes, without limitation, statements relating to CLEAR’s participation in the CMS Health Tech Ecosystem initiative. Investors are cautioned that any and such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance or results and involve risks and uncertainties, and that actual results, developments and events may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including risks associated with the initiative and CLEAR’s participation therein, and those described in the Company’s filings within the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the sections titled “Risk Factors” in our Annual Report on Form 10- K. The Company disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained herein.

CLEAR
media@clearme.com

This press release was published by a CLEAR® Verified individual.

The MIL Network –
August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI Submissions: Rockabye baby: the ‘love songs’ of lonely leopard seals resemble human nursery rhymes
Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Lucinda Chambers, PhD Candidate in Marine Bioacoustics, UNSW Sydney

CassandraSm/Shutterstock

Late in the evening, the Antarctic sky flushes pink. The male leopard seal wakes and slips from the ice into the water. There, he’ll spend the night singing underwater amongst the floating ice floes.

For the next two months he sings every night. He will sing so loudly, the ice around him vibrates. Each song is a sequence of trills and hoots, performed in a particular pattern.

In a world first, we analysed leopard seal songs and found the predictability of their patterns was remarkably similar to the nursery rhymes humans sing.

We think this is a deliberate strategy. While leopard seals are solitary animals, the males need their call to carry clearly across vast stretches of icy ocean, to woo a mate.

Solitary leopard seals want their call to carry.
Ozge Elif Kizil/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

A season of underwater solos

Leopard seals (Hydrurga leptonyx) are named after their spotted coats. They live on ice and surrounding waters in Antarctica.

Leopard seals are especially vocal during breeding season, which lasts from late October to early January. A female leopard seal sings for a few hours on the days she is in heat. But the males are the real showstoppers.

Each night, the males perform underwater solos for up to 13 hours. They dive into the sea, singing underwater for about two minutes before returning to the water’s surface to breathe and rest. This demanding routine continues for weeks.

A male leopard seal weighs about 320 kilograms, but produces surprisingly high-pitched trills, similar to those of a tiny cricket.

Within a leopard seal population, the sounds themselves don’t vary much in pitch or duration. But the order and pattern in which the sounds are produced varies considerably between individuals.

Our research examined these individual songs. We compared them to that of other vocal animals, and to human music.

Listening to songs from the sea

The data used in the study was collected by one author of this article, Tracey Rogers, in the 1990s.

Rogers rode her quad bike across the Antarctic ice to the edge of the sea and marked 26 individual male seals with dye as they slept. Then she returned to record their songs at night.

The new research involved analysing these recordings, to better understand their structure and patterns. We did this by measuring the “entropy” of their sequences. Entropy measures how predictable or random a sequence is.

We found the songs are composed of five key “notes” or call types. Listen to each one below.

A low double trill.
Tracey Rogers UNSW Sydney, CC BY-SA28.5 KB (download)

A hoot with low single trill.
Tracey Rogers UNSW Sydney, CC BY-SA53.8 KB (download)

High double trill.
Tracey Rogers UNSW Sydney, CC BY-SA29.7 KB (download)

Low descending single trill.
Tracey Rogers UNSW Sydney, CC BY-SA49 KB (download)

Medium single trill.
Tracey Rogers UNSW Sydney, CC BY-SA22.7 KB (download)

A remarkably predictable pattern

We then compared the songs of the male leopard seals with several styles of human music: baroque, classical, romantic and contemporary, as well as songs by The Beatles and nursery rhymes.

What stood out was the similarity between the predictability of human nursery rhymes and leopard seal calls. Nursery rhymes are simple, repetitive and easy to remember — and that’s what we heard in the leopard seal songs.

The range of “entropy” was similar to the 39 nursery rhymes from the Golden Song Book, a collection of words and sheet music for classic children’s songs, which was first published in 1945. It includes classics such:
- Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star
- Frère Jacques
- Ring Around a Rosy
- Baa, Baa, Black Sheep
- Humpty Dumpty
- Three Blind Mice
- Rockabye Baby.
For humans, the predictable structure of a nursery rhyme melody helps make it simple enough for a child to learn. For a leopard seal, this predictability may enable the individual to learn its song and keep singing it over multiple days. This consistency is important, because changes in pitch or frequency can create miscommunication.

Like sperm whales, leopard seals may also use song to set themselves apart from others and signal their fitness to reproduce. The greater structure in the songs helps ensure listeners accurately receive the message and identify who is singing.

Male leopard seals produce high-pitched cricket-like trills.

An evolving song?

Leopard seals sound very different to humans. But our research shows the complexity and structure of their songs is remarkably similar to our own nursery rhymes.

Communication through song is a very common animal behaviour. However, structure and predictability in mammal song has only been studied in a handful of species. We know very little about what drives it.

Understanding animal communication is important. It can improve conservation efforts and animal welfare, and provide important information about animal cognition and evolution.

Technology has advanced rapidly since our recordings were made in the 1990s. In future, we hope to revisit Antarctica to record and study further, to better understand if new call types have emerged, and if patterns of leopard seal song evolve from generation to generation.

Tracey Rogers receives funding from ARC.

Lucinda Chambers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Rockabye baby: the ‘love songs’ of lonely leopard seals resemble human nursery rhymes – https://theconversation.com/rockabye-baby-the-love-songs-of-lonely-leopard-seals-resemble-human-nursery-rhymes-262113
MIL OSI –
August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI Submissions: A Hawaiian epic made in NZ: why Jason Momoa’s Chief of War wasn’t filmed in its star’s homeland

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Duncan Caillard, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Communication Studies, Auckland University of Technology

Jason Momoa’s historical epic Chief of War, launching August 1 on Apple TV+, is a triumph of Hawaiians telling their own stories – despite the fact their film and TV production industry now struggles to be viable.

The series stars Momoa (Aquaman, Game of Thrones) as Kaʻaina, an ali’i (chief) who fights for – and later rises against – King Kamehameha I during the bloody reunification of Hawaii.

Already receiving advance praise, the nine-episode first season co-stars New Zealand actors Temeura Morrison, Cliff Curtis and Luciane Buchanan, alongside Hawaiian actors Kaina Makua, Brandon Finn and Moses Goods.

A passion project for Momoa, the Hawaiian star co-created the series with writer Thomas Pa’a Sibbett after years in development. With a reported budget of US$340 million, it is one of the most expensive television series ever produced.

It is also a milestone in Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) representation onscreen. Controversially, however, the production only spent a month in Hawaiʻi, and was mostly shot in New Zealand with non-Hawaiian crews.

Momoa has even expressed an interest in New Zealand citizenship, but the choice of location is more a reflection of the troubled state of the film industry in Hawaiʻi. On the other hand, it is a measure of the success of the New Zealand screen industry, with potential lessons for other countries in the Pacific.

Ea o Moʻolelo – story sovereignty

Set at the turn of the 19th century, Chief of War tells the moʻolelo (story, history) of King Kamehameha I’s conquest of the archipelago.

Hawaiʻi was historically governed by aliʻi nui (high chiefs), and each island was ruled independently. Motivated by the threat of European colonisation and empowered by Western weaponry, Kamehameha established the Hawaiian Kingdom, culminating in full unification in 1810.

The series is an important example of what authors Dean Hamer and Kumu Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu have called “Ea o Moʻolelo”, or story sovereignty, which emphasises Indigenous peoples’ right to control their own narrative by respecting the “the inalienable right of a story to its own unique contents, style and purpose”.

Chief of War is also the biggest Hawaiian television series ever produced. Although Hawaiʻi remains a popular setting onscreen, these productions have rarely involved Hawaiians in key decision-making roles.

Sea of troubles

The series hits screens at a time of major disruption in Hollywood, with streaming services upending established business models.

“Linear” network television faces declining viewership and advertising revenue. Movie studios struggle to draw audiences to theatres. The consequences for workers in the the industry have been severe, as the 2023 writers strike showed.

Those changes have had a catastrophic impact on the Hawaiʻi film industry, too.

Long a popular location – Hawaii Five-O (1968-1980, 2010-2020), Magnum P.I. (1980-1988, 2018-2024) and Lost (2004-2010) were all shot on location in Hawaiʻi – it is an expensive place to film.

Actors, crew and production equipment often have to be flown in from the continental United States, and producers compete with tourism for costly accommodation.

Kaina Makua as King Kamehameha and New Zealand actor Luciane Buchanan as Ka’ahumanu in Chief of War.
Apple TV+

An industry in transition

These are not uncommon problems in distant locations, and many governments try to attract screen productions through tax incentives and rebates on portions of the production costs.

New Zealand, for example, offers a 20-25% rebate for international productions and 40% for local productions. Hawaiʻi offers a 22-27% rebate.

But this is less than other US states offer, such as Georgia (30%), Louisiana (40%) and New Mexico (40%). Hawaiʻi also has an annual cap of US$50 million on rebates.

To make things even harder, Hawaiʻi offers only limited support for Indigenous filmmakers. Governments in Australia and New Zealand provide targeted funding and support for Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Māori filmmakers.

By contrast, the Hawaiʻi Film Commission doesn’t provide direct grants to local filmmakers or producers (Indigenous or otherwise). Small amounts of government funding have been administered through the Public Broadcasting Service, but this is now in jeopardy after US President Donald Trump recently cut federal funding.

The Hawaiʻi screen industry faces a perfect storm. For the first time since 2004, film and TV production has ground to a halt. Many workers now doubt the long-term sustainability of their careers.

Lessons from Aotearoa NZ

While there are lessons Hawaiʻi legislators and industry leaders could learn from New Zealand’s example, there should also be a measure of caution.

The Hawaiʻi tax credit system is out of date. But despite industry lobbying, legislation to update it failed to reach the floor of the legislature earlier this year. New tax settings would help make local production viable again.

Secondly, decades of investment in Māori cinema have seen it become diverse, engaging and creatively accomplished. Hawaiʻi could benefit from greater direct investment in Hawaiian storytelling, respecting its cultural value even if it doesn’t turn a commercial profit.

On the other hand, New Zealand has a favourable currency exchange rate with the US which can’t be replicated in Hawaiʻi. And New Zealand film production workers have seen their rights to unionise watered down compared to their American peers.

But if Hawaiʻi can get its settings right, a possible second season of Chief of War may yet be filmed there, which could mark a genuine rejuvenation of its own film industry.

Duncan Caillard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. A Hawaiian epic made in NZ: why Jason Momoa’s Chief of War wasn’t filmed in its star’s homeland – https://theconversation.com/a-hawaiian-epic-made-in-nz-why-jason-momoas-chief-of-war-wasnt-filmed-in-its-stars-homeland-261742

MIL OSI –

August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI Submissions: Friday essay: libertarian tech titan Peter Thiel helped make JD Vance. The Republican kingmaker’s influence is growing

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Luke Munn, Research Fellow, Digital Cultures & Societies, The University of Queensland

The money is easy to trace. Scroll back through tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel’s political donations and you’ll soon hit US$15 million worth of transfers sent to Protect Ohio Values, JD Vance’s campaign fund. The donations, made in 2022, are a staggering contribution to an individual senate race, and helped put Vance (Thiel’s former employee at tech fund Mithril Capital) on a winning trajectory.

But if money matters, so do ideas. Scroll back through Vance’s speeches, and you’ll hear echoes of Thiel’s voice. The decline of US elites (and by extension, the nation) is supposedly a result of technological stagnation: declining innovation, trivial distractions, broken infrastructure. To make the nation great again, Thiel believes, tech should come first, corporates should be unshackled, and the state should resemble the startup. For Vance, who has now risen to the office of US vice-president, a Thiel talk on these topics at Yale Law was “the most significant moment” of his time there.

Thiel’s influence on politics is at once financial, technical and ideological. In the New York Times, he was recently described as the “most influential right-wing intellectual of the last 20 years”. And his potent cocktail of networks, money, strategy and support exerts a rightward force on the political landscape. It establishes a powerful pattern for up-and-coming figures to follow.

To “hedge fund investor” and “tech entrepreneur”, Thiel has recently added a new label: Republican kingmaker.

Who is Peter Thiel?

Thiel was born in Germany but grew up in the United States, with a childhood sojourn in apartheid South Africa. Max Chafkin’s critical but balanced biography, The Contrarian, claims Thiel was bullied growing up and protected himself by becoming resolutely “disdainful”. He studied philosophy and then law at Stanford, where he founded The Stanford Review, a libertarian–conservative student paper that signalled his early interest in controversial politics and culture wars.

While difficult to pin down precisely, Thiel’s Christianity shapes his belief in a declining or even apocalyptic world that can only be countered with unapologetic interventions and technological innovations. God helps those who help themselves – but could always use additional help from ambitious tech elites.

In 1998, Thiel cofounded his first tech company, Confinity, which launched its flagship product PayPal in 1999 and merged with Elon Musk’s X.com in 2000. In 2002, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion and Thiel became a multimillionaire. He invested in several startups, including Facebook, and established his hedge fund, Clarium, and his venture capital firm, Founders Fund.

In their own ways, each of these developments is a response to Thiel’s thesis that the world is stuck. In his 2011 essay The End of the Future, he decries the “soft totalitarianism of political correctness in media and academia” and the “sordid world” of entertainment. The result is “50 years of stagnation” that has transformed humanity “into this more docile kind of a species”.

Thiel’s answer is more risk, more tech and more ambition. It’s exemplified most clearly by Palantir Technologies, the data analytics firm he cofounded in 2004.

Palantir has worked closely with US armed forces and intelligence agencies for 14 years. It is currently working closely with the Trump administration to create a “super-database” of combined data from all federal agencies, and building a platform for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “to track migrant movements in real time”.

Investing in right-wing politics

Thiel’s political interventions have ramped up over time. Libertarianism generally takes an arms-length approach to politics in favour of individual freedom and market determination. But even in “purely” financial spaces, politics creeps in.

Clarium’s macroeconomic approach meant the political landscape had to be factored in: “high-conviction, directional investments based on key drivers of the global economy and fundamental themes underappreciated by the marketplace”.

If politics, like technology, had stagnated – into a non-choice between similar parties – how could it be “disrupted”? Thiel began making political donations in December 2011, with contributions totalling at least $2.6 million, to the third presidential campaign of Ron Paul, a longstanding conservative congressman in Texas.

While Paul would ultimately be unsuccessful, Thiel recognised something others had missed. Voters had not been attracted to some idealistic libertarian, as the media portrayed him, but to the old Ron Paul, a neoconservative whose newsletters published in his name in the 1980s and ‘90s suggested 95% of Black men in Washington DC were criminals. (He denied writing them in 2011, calling the statements “terrible”.) His appeal was never “merely” about economic freedom, but about race and class, fear and grievance.

Donald Trump took this dark undercurrent, a strain that has always underpinned parts of US politics, and ran with it. Dog-whistles were dispensed with in favour of overt claims that most illegal immigrants were rapists, certain Latin American countries were shitholes, women were bitches, and white supremacists were “very fine people”. Trump, noted one article, was “weaponizing the conservative id”.

In these visions, multiculturalism and progressivism are not just cultural threats, but economic ones. They undermine the ability of company founders to exploit labour, blow past regulations, and obey the brutal logic of the market.

“A world safe for capitalism is presumably one of monopoly companies and patriarchal networks,” note media scholars Ben Little and Alison Winch in their profile of Thiel. It’s a world “where ‘the multiculture’ has been transformed into racialised domination”.

Thiel has certainly contributed to the rise of Trump and the new breed of right-wing politicians through his vast wealth. In 2016, Thiel contributed $1.25 million to Trump’s campaign, thinking “he had a 50-50 chance of winning”. This earned him a speaking slot at the Republican convention. But his influence extends beyond mere money.

Thiel’s endorsement of Trump at the 2016 Republican convention was hugely significant for garnering support. So was his famous declaration there that he was proud to be gay, Republican and American. After Trump won his first term, Thiel continued to be involved. He joined the transition team and recommended aligned individuals for key positions, such as Michael Kratsios, who would become chief technology officer.

So, Thiel’s support of Trump should be understood as an investment, just like his early investments in PayPal and Facebook. As Chafkin notes, Thiel’s bet on Trump is a wager with high upsides and low risk. Thiel’s outspoken views in favour of “seasteading” (floating independent city-states) and against immigration and women’s emancipation had already alienated the more progressive sectors of Silicon Valley.

If the bet paid off, Thiel and his empire could benefit handsomely. And this is exactly what has played out. Since Trump has taken office in his second term, Palantir has already netted more than $113 million in federal government spending.

Palantir: from information to domination

Palantir’s origin story reflects its blend of technical expertise and political ambition. To combat rising fraud, members of PayPal developed a software tool that could mine vast amounts of transactions and find the connections between them, homing in on a handful of culprits in a deluge of data.

Thiel was prescient in spinning this core idea from finance to intelligence, where analysts were searching for patterns and anomalies amid the noise – a needle in a haystack. Palantir commercialised and expanded this concept, bringing a leaner, data-driven Silicon Valley approach to a sector dominated by established Washington incumbents.

Thiel and Palantir chief executive Alex Karp believe Silicon Valley has lost its way, frittering away its vast talents and ingenuity on trivial pursuits: advertising, gaming, social media. For them, the era of ambitious scientific projects and unapologetic military industrial collaborations – the Manhattan Project, the Moon landing — needs to be revived.

In his book, the Technological Republic, Karp calls for a state that looks more like a startup – lean, technology-driven, and led authoritatively by a founder-like figure who is not afraid to “move fast and break stuff” (the Silicon Valley motto), especially when it comes to dominating enemies and ensuring the safety of a nation’s citizens.

Palantir, of course, answers this call. It combines machine learning with military spending, data-driven “intelligence” with naked violence. This is most clear in its longstanding collaboration with ICE, which is now carrying out notorious immigration raids at the behest of the Trump administration. “On the factory floor, in the operating room, on the battlefield,” states a recent Palantir recruitment ad placed across US college campuses, “we build to dominate.”

Palantir’s blueprint has been emulated by a growing array of others. Anduril, Skydio and Shield AI are all founded on developing information technologies for military and intelligence use. Last week, Rune Technologies closed a $24 million Series A round of funding to move warfare logistics away from the “Excel era” and towards AI-augmented tools.

Answering Karp’s call, these startups are unapologetic in leveraging engineering expertise for more substantial, authoritarian and historically controversial areas.

Playing the scapegoat

One of the clearest outlines of Thiel’s political philosophy is laid out in the Straussian Moment, a 30-page essay he published in 2007.

For Thiel, the spectacular violence of the September 11 terrorist attacks was a wake-up call, rousing the citizenry from that “very long and profitable period of intellectual slumber and amnesia that is so misleadingly called the Enlightenment”.

Curtis Yarvin.
David Merfield/Wikipedia, CC BY

In Thiel’s view, the Enlightenment project – to advance knowledge, cultivate tolerance, and elevate humanity as a whole – rested on a naive understanding of human nature. Like Curtis Yarvin and other influential Silicon Valley political thinkers, he asserts that humanity is brutal and a shift from Enlightenment optimism to Dark Enlightenment pessimism is required.

It is unsurprising, then, that Thiel looks to René Girard (once called “the new Darwin of the human sciences”) for inspiration; he even organised a symposium at Stanford with Girard in attendance. Girard begins from a bleak view of human nature, a Hobbesian world where life is nasty, brutish and short. For Girard, mimesis or imitation is at the heart of the human. This mirroring quality means violence is always threatening to escalate, to constantly ramp up with no inherent limit.

To corral this violence, ancient cultures created the scapegoat, a sacrificial system where all-against-all was replaced by all-against-one. Yet the scapegoat is no longer viable – the revelation of Christ is that the scapegoat is an innocent victim.

Thiel takes Girard’s insights and twists them to his own ends. First, Thiel asserts that even if violence begets more violence, nonviolence is not an option. Enemies must not be allowed to prevail. In the face of uncompromising adversaries, such as the 9/11 attackers, who threaten to dismantle some idealised way of life, preemptively responding to violence is “urgently demanded”.

Second, Thiel takes the concept of the scapegoat and flips it. In this judo-like manoeuvre, the real victims are not the marginalised or the minority, but the hegemonic class (whites, males, liberals, conservatives), who are being pressured by cancel culture, political correctness, diversity initiatives and so on.

Shortly after graduating, Thiel coauthored a book, The Diversity Myth, about alleged political intolerance at Stanford. In it, he rails against a rampant multiculturalism that he claims stifles freedom of speech and derails education and entrepreneurialism. Here, scapegoating is weaponised. It’s mobilised toward a conservative advance in the ongoing cultural wars, which are always also political wars.

Contradiction or evolution?

Thiel is a walking paradox. He bemoans cancel culture and political correctness, while waging a highly expensive and clearly personal war to bankrupt a media outlet that offended him. (After Gawker printed the “open secret” of Thiel’s gay status in 2007, Thiel funded lawsuits against them until they were shut down.)

He calls himself a libertarian, but has founded a company that derives millions in contracts from the bloated budgets of the many military agencies (the National Security Agency, the FBI, the US Army) that now comprise the sprawling state.

He celebrates capitalism and the free hand of the market, but always stresses that the path to business success rests on establishing monopolies with no real competition. He is a German-born immigrant who actively supports technologies (Palantir) and candidates (Trump) that establish xenophobic environments and seek to deport those deemed “other”. And, most personally, he is both a conservative Republican and an openly gay man.

At a purely logical level, these elements are incompatible. There is a perceived gap between Thiel’s words and actions, a gulf between his ideologies and his activities. For staunch libertarians at Thiel’s companies, his manoeuvrings at the state level make no sense. For queer scholars, Thiel’s exclusionary rather than liberatory politics mean he is a man who has sex with other men, rather than being gay.

For these critics, both things cannot be true; therefore, some labels, identities and activities are fake, marginal or impossible. Yet one of Thiel’s many lessons is that contradiction is a strength rather than a weakness.

Thiel’s philosophy, which journalists have called techno-fascism, recalls philosopher Umberto Eco, who described fascism as a “beehive of contradictions” and “a collage of different philosophical and political ideas”. The radical right, in particular, has no problem mashing together many views that at face value should not fit: scavenger ideologies that are opportunistic in grabbing elements that work for them.

Instead of contradictions, these hybrid forms need to be understood as evolutions. They are tensions, held within the body and the mind of the subject, that push monolithic frameworks like conservatism beyond their existing limits. Thiel’s power – and his political blueprint for others – is insisting you can be a philosophical entrepreneur, an illiberal patriot, and a queer conservative.

Luke Munn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Friday essay: libertarian tech titan Peter Thiel helped make JD Vance. The Republican kingmaker’s influence is growing – https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-libertarian-tech-titan-peter-thiel-helped-make-jd-vance-the-republican-kingmakers-influence-is-growing-261856

MIL OSI –

August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI USA News: From Coast to Coast, Americans Are Seeing the Benefits of President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill

Source: US Whitehouse

Americans will see the benefits of President Donald J. Trump’s landmark One Big Beautiful Bill for years to come through historic tax relief, strengthened public programs, secure borders, military investments, and much more.

Here is some of what is being written in local news outlets across the country:

KCRG-TV (Cedar Rapids, IA): Small businesses say ‘no tax on tips’ a step in the right direction

“Some business owners in eastern Iowa say new ‘no tax on tips’ provisions will help grow local businesses … It’s a relief some businesses say will make a huge difference with their employees.

‘More money in their pocket which will mean more money in the community,’ said Crystal Blin. Blin owns 319 social house, a bowling alley in Independence. She said small businesses can struggle to recruit employees against bigger companies, but no tax on tips means higher take home pay, which could help close the gap. …

Some view no tax on tips as a reinvestment in their workers and a way to offer some stability. ‘In the service industry too, you’re always constantly worried about what that end of the year number is going to be, and now with this we kind of have some relief with that,’ said Cora Krueger. Krueger is the assistant general manager of Denali’s on the River … ‘The more money we can put in our employees pockets, that means that they can take those dollars and support our local community and surrounding communities,’ Blin said.”

WENY-TV (Elmira, NY): Seniors Get a Boost: What to Know about the New Senior Tax Break Included in “One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act”

“A new tax break is heading to seniors’ wallets. It comes in the form of a new deduction tucked into the ‘One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act,’ recently signed into law by President Donald Trump … Starting next year, the IRS is cutting many retirees a bit more slack. Under the new law, individuals age 65 and older can claim an additional $6,000 deduction—on top of the existing standard senior deduction. Married couples where both qualify? That’s a $12,000 tax break.”

KSTP-TV (Saint Paul, MN): How the new US federal government $1,000 ‘baby bonus’ can help children

“President Trump’s ‘big beautiful bill’ includes a new savings plan for children with a one-time deposit of $1,000 from the federal government for newborns … For new parents, it’s being called a ‘baby bonus.’ Every baby born this year, next year, and in 2027 will get the bonus, which parents can add to the account.”

The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC): How the “Big Beautiful Bill” boosts QSBS benefits for startup employees and founders

“The new GOP budget legislation includes a massive win for startup employees and founders: dramatically expanded Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) benefits that could save qualifying investors from paying 28% capital gains taxes on millions of dollars in returns. The changes increase the maximum tax exclusion from $10 million to $15 million while allowing partial benefits after just three years instead of the current five-year minimum.”

WCMH-TV (Columbus, OH): Anduril, the company behind Ohio’s new megaproject, favored in ‘Big Beautiful Bill’

“As Anduril Industries ambitiously hopes to open its central Ohio-based drone and vehicular weapons manufacturing plant by July 2026, the defense systems manufacturer is already securing business. Trump’s new government spending bill allocates several billion dollars to border security and includes favorable policies for Anduril.”

Anchorage Daily News (Anchorage, AK): Alaska has the chance to seize prosperity with the Big Beautiful Bill

“These investments strengthen Alaska’s role in domestic energy production and in Arctic policy. At a time when global energy markets are uncertain and international competition is increasing, this legislation ensures Alaska is part of the solution. It’s also worth emphasizing that the bill doesn’t relax standards or bypass environmental oversight. It supports development within existing regulatory frameworks and honors Alaska’s history of balancing economic activity with environmental responsibility.”

Fort Worth Star-Telegram (Forth Worth, TX): Trump signs ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ into law. How much money will Texans save?

“Right now, taxpayers can deduct up to $10,000 in state and local taxes from their federal income tax bill. The One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act raises that to $40,000 for 2025. The amount will go up 1% each year in 2026, 2027, 2028 and 2029. There are additional limitations for people earning more than $500,000 a year.”

Startland News (Kansas City, MO): KC Tech Council celebrates tax fix in Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ that boosts growing businesses

“A tax fix included in the recently signed ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ — sprawling legislation meant to overhaul taxes in the United States — marks a major win for Kansas City’s tech and innovation economy, said Kara Lowe. At issue: a long-awaited change to Section 174 research and development expensing that now allows businesses to fully and permanently expense such investments, explained Lowe, CEO of KC Tech Council, which championed the fix alongside TECNA (Technology Councils of North America).”

WCAU-TV (Philadelphia, PA): Trump’s ‘big beautiful bill’ locks in key tax breaks for homeowners—here’s what to know

“President Donald Trump’s tax and spending bill revives and expands homeowner tax breaks — while making the current mortgage interest deduction cap permanent. The $750,000 limit on deductible mortgage debt ($375,000 for single filers) had been set to expire after 2025 and revert to the previous $1 million cap. Under the new law, that change is off the table.

The bill also temporarily raises the SALT deduction cap from $10,000 to $40,000 per household for tax years 2025 through 2029, with a phaseout beginning at $500,000 of income in 2025. The deduction cap reverts to $10,000 in 2030. The change could be especially impactful for homeowners in high-tax states like New York, New Jersey and California, where deductible state and local taxes often exceed the previous $10,000 cap.”

The Orange County Register (Irvine, CA): Big Beautiful bill delivers win for HSAs

“Starting Jan. 1, 2026, Americans enrolled in Bronze or Catastrophic Affordable Care Act plans may contribute to HSAs — around 7.3 million people who previously lacked access in 2025. The bill also allows HSA funds to pay for direct primary care memberships — modernizing how Americans can save for and manage health care expenses — and makes permanent the ability of high-deductible health plans to waive the deductible for telehealth visits.”

KARK-TV (Little Rock, AR): New federal budget includes relief for Arkansas farmers

“Reference prices — set federal rates that trigger support payments when market prices drop — are one of the most relied-on tools in the farm safety net. For Arkansas rice producers, who say they’ve been using outdated prices from 2012, the new adjustment is expected to make a meaningful difference in margins.

‘We hope that this gives us some stability and some consistency where we can make better decisions,’ Coker said. ‘That affects everything — labor, equipment, fertilizer — it all depends on what we can afford.’”

The Tennessean (Nashville, TN): Big Beautiful Bill includes tax credit for school vouchers: Here’s how much, how it works

“As an example, if someone donates $1,000, they can later receive a $1,000 credit on their federal tax return, so long as they itemize their tax return and have a tax liability to apply the credit toward. That means the federal government absorbs the cost of the scholarships, essentially making them federal school vouchers.

The tax credit far outweighs the benefits of a typical tax-deductible, charitable donation. At most, people are allowed to deduct 50% of their adjusted gross income for charitable donations, according to the IRS. In some cases 20% and 30% limits apply.

‘This is an unprecedented tax break, at the federal level,’ he said. ‘It’s just a super-sized incentive.’”

Antelope Valley Press (Los Angeles, CA): President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is a step ahead for America

“President Donald Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ is the latest political victory in an action-packed first six months in office. The bill restores some good governance that protects taxpayers and citizens and is a huge boost to working families and entrepreneurs. The bill should increase prosperity and start to slow our unsustainable growth in government spending.”

MageeNews.com (Mendenhall, MS): The “OBBB” Puts Americans and Farmers First

“For working Americans including our farmers, ranchers and landowners, the OBBB was and is a series of HUGE ‘wins.’ Perhaps the greatest win was the significant tax relief delivered to all hardworking Americans. Recognizing that ‘Farm Security is National Security,’ these wins through the OBBB will strengthen our American producers for years – for generations – of future farm families.”

The Berkeley Independent (Summerville, SC): 529 updates in ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ give families even more flexibility for educational savings

“As administrator of South Carolina’s Future Scholar 529 Plan, I’m happy to share that the recent passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act spells good news for South Carolina families who are using tax-advantaged 529 savings plans to save for their children’s education. The bill expands qualified uses for 529 funds, providing greater flexibility for families and making an already effective program even more beneficial.”

Agweek (Fargo, ND): ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ enhances farm program safety net

“The large reconciliation bill, or the so-called ‘One Big Beautiful Bill,’ was passed by Congress and signed into law in early July … there are some adjustments and enhancements in the legislation that could be very beneficial to farmers, including increased reference prices and improved crop insurance provisions. … Approximately 90% of the added funding for ag-related programs in the reconciliation bill is targeted to farm ‘safety net’ programs, such as PLC, ARC-CO, crop insurance, and the Dairy Margin Coverage Program.”

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (The Chronicle of Mt. Juliet, Mt. Juliet, TN): One Big Beautiful Bill is a victory for American people

“On Independence Day, President Trump made history. He signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill—a once-in-a-generation victory that fulfills his promise to Make America Great Again. By providing the largest tax cut in our nation’s history, it will supercharge our economy. Tennessee households will save an average of $2,600 in taxes next year and see an average annual take-home pay increase of over $10,000. With the largest-ever investment in border security, it empowers the Department of Homeland Security to complete President Trump’s border wall and hire thousands of new Border Patrol agents. It also bolsters our military, enacts common-sense permitting reforms to make America energy dominant again and eliminates hundreds of billions of dollars in far-left, Green New Deal spending, putting our nation on a more sustainable fiscal path.”

Sen. Katie Britt (The Alexander City Outlook, Alexander City, AL): The one big beautiful bill delivers for Alabama

“There’s been a lot of national conversation about how transformational this bill is. But let’s talk about what it means for Alabama. To start, Alabamians can expect to keep more of their hard-earned money because of this bill. We extended President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and, as a result, prevented the largest tax hike in modern history. Alabama families were staring down an average of a $2,200 tax increase—we made sure that didn’t happen. We made sure to take care of our seniors as well, who will now be able to deduct up to $6,000 – $12,000 for couples filing jointly – from their taxes annually.”

Sen. Mike Crapo (The Post Register, Idaho Falls, ID): A stronger future for Idahoans

“Responsibility to Idaho taxpayers: The law also achieves the most significant spending reductions in history by slashing Green New Deal spending, eliminating tax loopholes, and rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in federal spending programs. When combined with the pro-growth elements of President Trump’s economic agenda, the Council of Economic Advisers estimates the United States will achieve nearly $4.5 trillion in deficit reduction over ten 10 years.”

Sen. Steve Daines (Clark Fork Valley Press, Plains, MT): Big Beautiful Bill is a win for Montana

“President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is a tremendous win for Montana. It will spur economic growth, strengthen border security as well as expand Montana’s energy sector and provide much-needed funding for our military. And thanks to the diligent work of the entire Montana congressional delegation, we defeated attempts to sell our public lands.”

Sen. Deb Fischer (Syracuse Journal-Democrat, Syracuse, NE): How the One Big, Beautiful Bill Delivers Tax Relief to Nebraska Families

“When Americans went to the polls last November, they sent a clear message. They want a government that prioritizes safer neighborhoods, more affordable energy, and real economic relief — especially for working families. Earlier this month, Congress responded with a tangible solution. We stopped a $4 trillion tax hike and advanced a law that locks in the economic policies that have helped families and small businesses thrive. This new law cements the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) into permanent policy, preserving critical tax benefits for families across the country. For the average Nebraska household, that means $2,400 a year in savings — money that can help pay for groceries, utilities, or a child’s education.”

Rep. Ken Calvert (The Desert Sun, Palm Springs, CA): Tax Relief on the way for Coachella Valley taxpayers

“The Coachella Valley is home to a unique mix of residents, including large populations of retired senior citizens and employees who support the region’s tourism economy. Despite the different demographics of these two groups, they will both see targeted benefits from the recent working family tax law I voted to pass earlier this month. Retired Americans who live on a fixed income rely heavily on the Social Security and Medicare benefits. Protecting those benefits is a top priority for our seniors – and it’s one of my top priorities, too. I promised the seniors I represent that I would not cut their benefits, and the recent tax and spending bill that was signed into law honors that commitment. There are no cuts to either Social Security or Medicare benefits in the bill.”

Rep. Jeff Crank (The Colorado Springs Gazette, Colorado Springs, CO): Why I voted in favor of the One Big, Beautiful Bill

“The One Big, Beautiful Bill, some of the most conservative legislation worked on in Congress, delivers the largest tax cuts in American history, ensures no tax on tips or overtime, protects Medicaid for our nation’s most vulnerable, increases defense spending, secures our borders and more. The bill promises a prosperous future for our country, yet there are some who continue to promote falsehoods about what this bill does. As the Representative for Colorado’s 5th Congressional District, it is my duty to outline why I voted for this bill. Let’s get this straight: the One Big, Beautiful Bill protects the Medicaid system for the most vulnerable and those that truly need it; benefits for pregnant women, children, seniors, and individuals with disabilities would see no changes with their Medicaid plans.”

Rep. Randy Feenstra (The Gazette, Cedar Rapids, IA): ’Big Beautiful Bill’ grows our economy

“For farmers and small businesses, the ‘One, Big, Beautiful Bill’ protects millions of smaller operations and businesses from excessive taxation by raising the death tax exemption. These entities also will benefit from doubled small business expensing, immediate R & D expensing, and deductions on qualified business income. It also increases reference prices for corn and soybeans, strengthens crop insurance, and fully funds foreign animal disease prevention, mitigation, and response.”

Rep. Brett Guthrie (The Owensboro Messenger and Inquirer, Owensboro, KY): Here’s the truth: The One Big Beautiful Bill actually strengthens Medicaid

“The Medicaid provisions included in the One, Big Beautiful Bill ensure our most vulnerable Americans continue receiving the support they need. It strengthens the program by removing deceased recipients from the Medicaid rolls, requiring states to conduct more frequent eligibility checks for the expansion population, ensuring that individuals are not enrolled in multiple states and enacting commonsense work requirements for able-bodied Americans who choose not to work. Additionally, our bill expands access to Home and Community Based Services for low-income seniors and individuals living with a disability.”

Rep. Lisa McClain (The Detroit News, Detroit, MI): Big Beautiful Bill is a win for Michiganians

“This landmark legislation combines common-sense reforms with bold investments in our communities. At its heart, the bill is about rebuilding the American dream from the ground up; making it more affordable to live, work and raise a family in Michigan. Whether you’re running a small business, working long shifts at a restaurant or raising kids, this bill will make your life better.”

Rep. Tom Tiffany (Wausau Pilot & Review, Wausau, WI): What the One Big Beautiful Bill means for you

“The bill also raises the Child Tax Credit to $2,200 per child and establishes a $1,000 investment account for American newborns, helping give every child a head start. It also supports working parents by expanding the Employer-Provided Child Care Credit, encouraging more businesses to offer affordable child care.”

MIL OSI USA News –

August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI Economics: Samsung Partners With Liberty To Bring Iconic British Designs to Samsung Art Store

Source: Samsung

Samsung Electronics today announced its collaboration with iconic British design house Liberty, bringing a curated collection of the brand’s most celebrated designs to Samsung Art Store.1 With this partnership, Samsung Art TV users around the world can now display 20 new designs from Liberty’s rich archive of timeless art and patterns from the comfort of their own homes.

The collaboration merges the elegance of Samsung Art TVs with Liberty’s world-renowned archive, making the stunning designs available as digital artworks for the first time. Samsung curators worked closely with the in-house Liberty team to select patterns that would translate beautifully into a large-scale digital display that is alive with detail, light and color.

“This partnership was driven by a shared desire to celebrate British design in new ways,” said Rachael Roberts, Partnerships Manager at Samsung UK. “With no other British design houses currently represented on Samsung Art Store, it felt like the perfect opportunity to bring Liberty’s unique voice to our global audience.”

▲ One of the most celebrated designs from Liberty named Artemis (2023), shown on 2025 The Frame by Samsung.

Founded in 1875, Liberty has long been a symbol of British creativity and craftsmanship. Known for its distinctive prints and established history of design innovation, the brand’s influence spans art, fashion and interiors. For this partnership, the collection is introduced with Artemis as the featured design — a bold, botanical take on a classic Liberty design. Spanning over a century of heritage and creativity, the collection includes everything from the whimsical Enchanted Wood to the vibrant Jungle Trip design.

“At Liberty, we’ve always believed in design that tells a story, and stories that evolve with time,” said Pere Bruach, Design Manager at Liberty. “Partnering with Samsung allowed us to reimagine our most iconic prints as living art, infusing them with a new dimension. These works, once found on silk and paper, are now reinterpreted for the home — bringing the spirit of Liberty and the timeless beauty of pattern and print into people’s everyday spaces.”

▲ 2025 The Frame Pro showcases ‘Marina’s Tea Garden,’ from Liberty’s Autumn/Winter 2025 collection. This bold floral patternhas been meticulously recreated to capture the rich colors and subtle tones of gouache brushstrokes. Available as a digital artworktailored to Samsung Art Store, it brings character, history and a touch of British charm to living spaces everywhere.

Among the 20 Liberty designs featured, standout works include “Artemis,” “Marina’s Tea Garden,” “Fantasy Land,” and “My Grown Up Star,” from Liberty’s Autumn/Winter 2025 collection. Each design is presented as a digital artwork tailored to Samsung Art Store, bringing character, history and a touch of British charm into living spaces everywhere.

“When selecting the right pieces for Samsung Art Store, we were drawn to those that best encapsulate Liberty’s visual language,” Bruach added. “From nostalgic 1930s florals and hand-painted botanicals to eclectic geometric designs and enchanting landscapes, the collection reflects the full spectrum of our creative heritage. Artemis, for example, felt like a natural fit for The Frame — it speaks to the blend of tradition and modernity that defines both our brands.”

“Liberty’s legacy of storytelling makes them a dream partner,” said Roberts. “Our vision for the Art Store has always been to make art and design that brings meaning to people’s lives accessible, and Liberty’s prints bring exactly that — a daily joy and a sense of place.”

This new collaboration underscores Samsung Art Store’s mission to democratize access to global art, with a growing archive of over 3,500 artworks from the world’s most renowned museums and art institutions. Now, with the addition of Liberty’s British classics, a new chapter in which printmaking heritage meets innovation begins.

About Liberty
Liberty is a movement dedicated to discovery, animated by arts, culture, design and the pursuit of beauty. Liberty is famed for its original curation, directional design and celebration of craftsmanship. In the spirit of our founder, Arthur Lasenby Liberty, we remain unapologetically eccentric and committed to bringing good design to all.

1 Liberty artworks are available through the Samsung Art Store in all service countries except India.

MIL OSI Economics –

August 5, 2025
MIL-Evening Report: ER Report: A Roundup of Significant Articles on EveningReport.nz for August 1, 2025

ER Report: Here is a summary of significant articles published on EveningReport.nz on August 1, 2025.

Why UK recognition of a Palestinian state should not be conditional on Israel’s actions
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Karen Scott, Professor in Law, University of Canterbury Getty Images The announcement this week by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer on the recognition of a Palestininian state has been welcomed by many who want to see a ceasefire in Gaza and lasting peace in the region. In

Governments are becoming increasingly secretive. Here’s how they can be made to be more transparent
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gabrielle Appleby, Professor of Law, UNSW Law School, UNSW Sydney Transparency is vital to our democratic system of government. It promotes good government, spurring those in power into better practice. Even when what is revealed is pretty revolting, transparency means those transgressions are known, and accountability for

Wood fires, warm drinks, hot water bottles: 5 expert tips on how to avoid burns this winter
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lisa Martin, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, School of Biomedical Sciences, Pathology and Laboratory Science, The University of Western Australia Alex P/Pexels It’s a cold, crisp evening and the air carries a chill that bites. As temperatures drop and houses get colder, we turn to trusted sources of

Is Australia becoming a more violent country?
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Samara McPhedran, Principal Research Fellow, Violence Research and Prevention Program, Griffith University Almost every day, it seems we read or hear reports another family is grieving the murder of a loved one in a street brawl, another business owner is hospitalised after trying to fend off armed

The royal commission recommended abolishing time limits on abuse cases – a year on, nothing has changed
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Zoë Prebble, Lecturer in Criminal Law, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington Getty Images Among the 138 recommendations of the Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry’s final report to parliament was a clear call: remove the legal time limits that prevent survivors of historic

Industrial-scale deepfake abuse caused a crisis in South Korean schools. Here’s how Australia can avoid the same fate
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joel Scanlan, Senior Lecturer in Health Information Management, University of Tasmania South Korea’s deepfake crisis triggered a wave of protests in 2024. Anthony WALLACE / AFP Australian schools are seeing a growing number of incidents in which students have created deepfake sexualised imagery of their classmates. The

Colombia is producing more cocaine than ever – and more is reaching Australian shores
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cesar Alvarez, Lecturer in Terrorism and Security Studies, Charles Sturt University Members of the Colombian anti-narcotics police test cocaine after a drug bust. RAUL ARBOLEDA/AFP via Getty Images Imagine an area larger than the Australian Capital Territory, nearly twice the size of London and four times that

How can I tell if I am lonely? What are some of the signs?
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marlee Bower, Senior Research Fellow, Matilda Centre for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use, University of Sydney gremlin/Getty Images Without even realising it, your world sometimes gradually gets smaller: less walking, fewer days in the office, cancelling on friends. Watching plans disintegrate on the chat as

Rockabye baby: the ‘love songs’ of lonely leopard seals resemble human nursery rhymes
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lucinda Chambers, PhD Candidate in Marine Bioacoustics, UNSW Sydney CassandraSm/Shutterstock Late in the evening, the Antarctic sky flushes pink. The male leopard seal wakes and slips from the ice into the water. There, he’ll spend the night singing underwater amongst the floating ice floes. For the next

Shark tales, a sinking city and a breathless cop thriller: what to watch in August
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexa Scarlata, Lecturer, Digital Communication, RMIT University As the cool nights continue, it’s the perfect time to cozy up with a new batch of captivating films and series. This month’s streaming highlights bring a little bit of everything, from gripping true crime, to thought-provoking political drama, and

A Hawaiian epic made in NZ: why Jason Momoa’s Chief of War wasn’t filmed in its star’s homeland
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Duncan Caillard, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Communication Studies, Auckland University of Technology Jason Momoa’s historical epic Chief of War, launching August 1 on Apple TV+, is a triumph of Hawaiians telling their own stories – despite the fact their film and TV production industry now struggles

As protesters condemn Western media ‘complicity’, Gaza journalists struggle for survival
Asia Pacific Report Protesters demonstrated outside several major US media outlets in Washington this week condemning their coverage of the genocide in Gaza, claiming they were to blame over misinformation and the worsening catastrophe. Banging pots and pans to spotlight the starvation crisis, they accused the media of “complicity in genocide”. Banners and placards proclaimed

The company tax regime is a roadblock to business investment. Here’s what needs to change
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Robson, Deputy Chair, Productivity Commission, and Adjunct Professor, Queensland University of Technology Erman Gunes/Shutterstock Productivity growth is a key driver of improvements in living standards. But in Australia over the last decade, output per hour worked grew by less than a quarter of its 60-year average.

Grattan on Friday: Aggrieved Liberals stamp their feet, testing Sussan Ley’s authority
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra As any leader of a political party knows, when you demote people they can become difficult, or worse. Among Opposition Leader Sussan Ley’s multiple problems are two very unhappy former frontbenchers. Sarah Henderson, who was opposition education spokeswoman last term,

Espionage cost Australia $12.5 billion in 2023-24, ASIO boss Mike Burgess says
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra Espionage cost Australia $12.5 billion in 2023-24, according to a study by ASIO and the Australian Institute of Criminology. The figure includes the direct costs of known espionage incidents, including state-sponsored theft of intellectual property, as well as the indirect

Labor well-placed to win three Bass seats in Tasmanian election, giving left a total of 20 of 35 MPs
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne Labor is well-placed to win three seats in the electorate of Bass at the Tasmanian election, although its party totals imply it deserves only two. This would

The Muslim world has been strong on rhetoric, short on action over Gaza and Afghanistan
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amin Saikal, Emeritus Professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies, Australian National University; and Vice Chancellor’s Strategic Fellow, Australian National University When it comes to dealing with two of the biggest current crises in the Muslim world – the devastation of Gaza and the Taliban’s draconian

Kids need to floss too, even their baby teeth. But how do you actually get them to do it?
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dileep Sharma, Professor and Head of Discipline – Oral Health, University of Newcastle Jonathan Borba/Pexels A survey from the Australian Dental Association out this week shows about three in four children never floss their teeth, or have adults do it for them. Many of the survey respondents

Grief is the Thing with Feathers comes to the stage with a glorious intensity of purpose
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Huw Griffiths, Associate Professor of English Literature, University of Sydney Brett Boardman/Belvoir The idea of the titular Crow in Ted Hughes’ poems is wild, untameable and irreducible to words. In an early poem in the sequence, words come at Crow from all angles but he just ignores

Politics with Michelle Grattan: independent MP Allegra Spender on making tax fairer for younger Australians
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra With parliament now finished its first fortnight’s session, attention will soon be on the government’s August 19-21 economic reform roundtable, bringing together business, unions, experts and community representatives to pursue consensus on ways to lift Australia’s flagging productivity. Independent member

MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI China: China’s gaming market sees 14% sales revenue growth in H1

Source: People’s Republic of China – State Council News

China’s gaming market sees 14% sales revenue growth in H1

Xinhua | August 1, 2025

A booth showcasing “Wuchang: Fallen Feathers” is pictured at the Bilibili World 2025 convention for digital content and creators in Shanghai, east China, July 11, 2025. (Bilibili/Handout via Xinhua)

China’s gaming market saw its actual sales revenue reach a record high of 168 billion yuan (about 23.5 billion U.S. dollars) in the first half of 2025, up 14.08 percent year on year, according to the ongoing China International Digital Entertainment Industry Conference (CDEC) Summit Forum in Shanghai.

During the period, the number of Chinese game users approached 679 million. The actual sales revenue of Chinese self-developed games in overseas markets exceeded 9.5 billion U.S. dollars, up 11.07 percent year on year.

The major overseas markets for Chinese games are the United States, which accounts for 31.96 percent, followed by Japan and the Republic of Korea, according to an industry report released during the conference by China Audio-video and Digital Publishing Association.

China is the world’s largest gaming market, with domestic sales revenue surpassing 325 billion yuan in 2024.

“The Chinese gaming industry, with its profound cultural heritage and continuous technological innovation, is gaining high recognition on the world stage,” said Ao Ran, executive vice president and secretary general of the association.

MIL OSI China News –

August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI Australia: UPDATE #3: Concern for welfare – Alice Springs Region

Source: Northern Territory Police and Fire Services

The Northern Territory Police Force continues to hold serious concerns for the welfare of 26-year-old Gach, who has been missing since the afternoon of Monday 28 July.

Extensive search efforts, coordinated by the NT Police Force’s Search and Rescue Section (SRS), have now entered their fourth day. The operation continues to be centred around an area approximately 21km west of Alice Springs and involves more than 50 personnel from NT Police, NT Emergency Services, NT Fire and Rescue Service, and Parks and Wildlife NT.

Ground teams, ATVs, drones, the Dog Operations Unit, and a Jet Ranger helicopter have now covered more than 500km² of rugged terrain since the search commenced on Tuesday.

Gach is described as being of Sudanese appearance, with dark skin, a slim build, short curly hair, and approximately 6 feet tall. He was last seen wearing cream tracksuit pants, a black t-shirt, a red/orange puffer jacket, and dark-coloured shoes.

Police are maintaining close contact with Gach’s family and urge anyone with information to contact police on 131 444.

In particular, police urge anyone who may have seen Gach in the vicinity of Larapinta Drive, Standley Chasm, or Simpsons Gap on the evening of Monday 28 July is encouraged to reach out.

MIL OSI News –

August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI Asia-Pac: Public consultation launched on renewal of domestic free television programme service licences

Source: Hong Kong Government special administrative region

The following is issued on behalf of the Communications Authority:

     The Communications Authority (CA) announced today (August 1) the commencement of a two-month public consultation on the applications for the renewal of domestic free television programme service (free TV) licences.

     The free TV licences of HK Television Entertainment Company Limited (HKTVE), i-CABLE HOY Limited (i-CABLE HOY) and Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB) are due to expire between 2027 and 2028. The three licensees have submitted their licence renewal applications to the CA. In accordance with the requirements under the Broadcasting Ordinance (Cap. 562) (BO) and established procedures, the CA will carry out a detailed assessment of the licensees’ past performance and renewal proposals, and collect public views through various means, including carrying out a two-month public consultation, an opinion survey, a televised online public hearing (TOPH) and focus group discussions. The CA will take into account performances of the licensees, views of the industry and public, the latest market developments etc, and make recommendations on the licence renewal applications to the Chief Executive in Council before the end of March 2026.

     Members of the public may give their views through various means, including submitting views in writing by September 30, 2025 (by email: consultation-tv-2025@ofca.gov.hk, fax: 2507 2219 or mail to: Office of the Communications Authority (Attn: Broadcasting Section 33), 20/F, Wu Chung House, 213 Queen’s Road East, Wan Chai, Hong Kong); and/or by participating in the TOPH which will be held on September 20, 2025. For the TOPH registration arrangements and the details of the licensees’ services (including compliance records and investment plans), please visit the dedicated webpage on the CA’s website.

     The free TV licences of HKTVE, i-CABLE HOY and TVB are valid for 12 years from April 1, 2015, to March 31, 2027, May 31, 2016, to May 30, 2028, and December 1, 2015, to November 30, 2027, respectively. As required by the BO, the three licensees have submitted their licence renewal applications to the CA no less than 24 months before the expiry of the validity period of their licences. Having regard to the proximity of expiry of the three licences, the CA will carry out a consolidated review exercise for the renewal applications in accordance with the BO and established practice.

MIL OSI Asia Pacific News –

August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI: Azerion Announces New Role for Co-Founder Atilla Aytekin
Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

Amsterdam, 1 August 2025 – Azerion today announces that, after stepping aside from his responsibilities as co-CEO in March 2023, Atilla Aytekin, Co-Founder and current member of the Management Board, has decided to transition to the position of advisor to the Executive Committee and the strategy team.

Atilla Aytekin co-founded Azerion in 2014 and has played a central role in building the company into one of Europe’s leading digital advertising and media platforms. His vision and leadership have been instrumental in Azerion’s growth, global expansion, and successful listing on Euronext Amsterdam.

“On behalf of the entire company and the Supervisory Board, I would like to thank Atilla for his remarkable contribution to Azerion over the past decade,” said Wim de Pundert, Chair of the Supervisory Board. “His deep knowledge of the industry and entrepreneurial spirit will continue to benefit Azerion in his new advisory capacity.”

Mr. Aytekin will remain closely involved with the business as a trusted strategic advisor, providing continuity and guidance as Azerion continues to execute its long-term growth strategy.

“I’m incredibly proud of what we have built at Azerion,” said Atilla Aytekin. “This is the right moment for me to step up and support the company from a more strategic perspective. I have full confidence in the leadership team and the future of the company.”

About Azerion
Founded in 2014, Azerion (EURONEXT: AZRN) is one of Europe’s largest digital advertising and entertainment media platforms. Azerion brings global scaled audiences to advertisers in an easy and cost-effective way, delivered through our proprietary technology, in a safe, engaging, and high quality environment, utilizing our strategic portfolio of owned and operated content with entertainment and other digital publishing partners.

Having its roots in Europe and with its headquarters in Amsterdam, Azerion has commercial teams based in 21 cities around the world to closely support our clients and partners to find and execute creative ways to make a real impact through advertising.

For more information visit: www.azerion.com

Contact:
Investor Relations
ir@azerion.com

Media
press@azerion.com

This communication contains information that qualifies as inside information within the meaning of Article 7(1) of the EU Market A

Attachment
- Atilla Aytekin Role Transition July 2025
The MIL Network –
August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI Asia-Pac: View sought on TV licence renewals

Source: Hong Kong Information Services

The Communications Authority today announced the launch of a public consultation on applications for the renewal of domestic free television programme service (free TV) licences.

The free TV licences of HK Television Entertainment Company (HKTVE), i-CABLE HOY and Television Broadcasts (TVB), each with a validity of 12 years, are due to expire between 2027 and 2028.

The three licensees have submitted licence renewal applications to the authority.

In accordance with requirements under the Broadcasting Ordinance and established procedures, the authority will carry out a detailed assessment of the licensees’ past performance and renewal proposals, and collect public views through various means. This will include carrying out a two-month public consultation, an opinion survey, a televised online public hearing and focus group discussions.

The authority will take into account the licensees’ respective performances, views from the industry and public, market developments, and more. It will make recommendations on the three licence renewal applications to the Chief Executive in Council before the end of March 2026.

Members of the public may submit their views in writing by email, by fax to 2507 2219, or by mail to Office of the Communications Authority (Attn: Broadcasting Section 33), 20/F, Wu Chung House, 213 Queen’s Road East, Wan Chai, Hong Kong.

They may also register to participate in the televised online public hearing, due to be held on September 20.

The public consultation will end on September 30.

The free TV licence of HKTVE is valid until March 31, 2027, while the licence of TVB runs until November 30, 2027, and that of i-CABLE HOY until May 30, 2028.

MIL OSI Asia Pacific News –

August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI Africa: President Ramkalawan Attends 10th Anniversary Celebration of the My First Job Scheme

Source: APO

.

The Ministry of Employment and Social Affairs, through its Employment Department, hosted a special commemorative ceremony on Thursday afternoon at the Eden Bleu Hotel to mark the 10th anniversary of the My First Job (MFJ) Scheme—an initiative that has played a vital role in empowering and integrating young Seychellois into the workforce.

The event was graced by the presence of the President of the Republic of Seychelles, Mr. Wavel Ramkalawan, who delivered the keynote address as Guest of Honour. In his remarks, the President commended the Ministry and its partners for the tangible impact the scheme has had over the past decade, highlighting the government’s continued commitment to youth empowerment and the promotion of inclusive employment opportunities.

The ceremony, which was also attended by First Lady Mrs. Linda Ramkalawan, Vice-President Mr. Ahmed Afif, and various distinguished guests, featured a captivating video montage retracing the decade-long journey of the MFJ Scheme. Delivering the official keynote address on behalf of the Ministry, Minister for Employment and Social Affairs, Mrs. Patricia Francourt, reflected on the programme’s vision, key milestones, and inspiring success stories that have shaped its impact over the years.

The programme included heartfelt testimonies from MFJ participants, musical performances, and a series of award presentations – among them the Loyalty Award and the Excellence Award – honouring outstanding contributions by both employers and beneficiaries who have played a pivotal role in the success of the scheme.

A highlight of the ceremony was the unveiling of the new My First Job Scheme logo, symbolising the scheme’s evolution and future aspirations.

The event concluded with a commemorative group photo and a light cocktail, bringing together government officials, employers, programme alumni, and stakeholders in a spirit of reflection, pride, and continued collaboration.

The My First Job Scheme, launched in 2015, remains a cornerstone of the government’s employment strategy – bridging the gap between education and the workforce while fostering a culture of professionalism and responsibility among young workers.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of State House Seychelles.

MIL OSI Africa –

August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI United Kingdom: Appointment of Churches Conservation Trust members: 1 August 2025
Source: United Kingdom – Government Statements

Press release

Appointment of Churches Conservation Trust members: 1 August 2025

The King has approved the nomination of Trustees of the Board of the Churches Conservation Trust.
The King has approved the nomination of Bishop Andrew Rumsey, Dr Ingrid Samuel OBE, Lord (Stephen) Parkinson of Whitley Bay, Michael Bithell JP, Vivienne King and Reverend Canon Timothy Goode.

Andrew Rumsey read history at the University of Reading before training for ordination at Ridley Hall, Cambridge and doctoral studies at King’s College, London. Ordained in 1997, he has held a variety of parish posts in London and Southwark and was appointed Suffragan Bishop of Ramsbury in 2018. Andrew is the joint National Church of England Lead for Church and Cathedral Buildings, and is a writer, musician and champion for Anglican heritage.

Dr Ingrid Helene Samuel OBE was educated at McGill University, Canada, obtaining BA in History, she then gained a M Litt and PhD in Modern History at Jesus College, Cambridge. In 2004 Ingrid was Head of Culture for the London Olympic Bid and between 2005 – 2011 has held several roles in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport including Head of Properties and Ceremonial Branch, Head of Heritage, and Head of Heritage and Architecture. Additionally, in 2011 she took up the role of Placemaking and Heritage Director with the National Trust.

Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, obtaining an MA in History. From 2021-2024 Stephen was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Culture, Media & Sport, and previously was Political Secretary to the Prime Minister and Special Adviser to the Home Secretary.

Michael Bithell JP was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, completing a MA in Engineering Science and post-graduate studies in Manufacture and Management at Cambridge University. Now retired, Michael was Group Finance Director of United Westminster and Grey Coat Foundation from 2015 to 2022. Previously, he worked for Deloitte LLP for 23 years, as Director, National Quality & Risk; and Director, Corporate Finance Government & Infrastructure. He has a number of voluntary and non-executive positions, including as a member of London Diocesan Synod, Finance Committee and Non-Property Investment Committee, as a Magistrate and an Honorary Steward of Westminster Abbey.

Vivienne King was educated at Keele University obtaining a BSoc Sci in Law and Politics in 1983, subsequently completing a Legal Practice Course at the College of Law in 1985. In 2010 and 2012 she completed a Corporate Finance Programme with Cranfield University and in 2021 undertook Business Sustainability Management with the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. After seven years as Real Estate Associate with Herbert Smith Freehills, Vivienne joined The Crown Estate in 1994 as a Senior Solicitor and was subsequently Director of Business Operations & General Counsel. She was CEO of the Soho Housing Association from 2016 to 2020, CEO of Revo and then Head of Real Estate Social Impact at The Good Economy. In March 2024 Vivienne founded Impactful Places, an independent sustainability consultancy.

Timothy Goode has been the Canon for Congregational Discipleship and Nurture at York Minster since September 2023. Previously he was Rector of St Margaret’s Lee in South East London, and a member of General Synod and Archbishops’ Council. Tim is a member of the National Disability Task Group, which advises the Archbishops of Canterbury and York on disability issues and he led the first debate on disability at the General Synod in July 2022. Tim was a secondary school teacher at the Roehampton Institute and Director of Music of Homefield School from 1995-2007. He trained for ministry at Ripon College Cuddesdon and served his title at Croydon Minster, in the Diocese of Southwark and was ordained priest in 2010. From September 2012 to May 2018, he was Team Vicar of St Luke’s Whyteleafe and St Peter and St Paul, Chaldon, part of the Caterham Team ministry. From 2013 to 2021 he was additionally the Southwark Diocesan Disability Advisor. Tim was made an Honorary Canon of Southwark Cathedral in September 2020 and has been a trustee of the Churches Conservation Trust since November 2020. He has now been re-appointed in the role for a second term until October 2028.

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Updates to this page

Published 1 August 2025
MIL OSI United Kingdom –
August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI Asia-Pac: Interactive multimedia theatre “Home” from Netherlands to stage in August (with photos)

Source: Hong Kong Government special administrative region

Interactive multimedia theatre “Home” from Netherlands to stage in August
     “Home” is inspired by the creator Anastasiia’s own journey from Ukraine to the Netherlands. The story revolves around Anastasiia and her dog Djonnik, whose house is carried away by a storm. While searching for a new home, they meet and listen to stories of a number of animal friends, including a giraffe living in a skyscraper and a penguin in an ice house, and eventually discover the true meaning of home. Through engaging storytelling, vibrant animation and gentle music, audiences are encouraged to reflect on home not being about just four walls, but also as an irreplaceable bond in everyone’s heart.

     The performance schedule is as follows:

Date and time: August 9 (Saturday), 2.30pm and 4.30pm
*August 10 (Sunday), 11am and 3pm
Place: Hong Kong Cultural Centre Studio Theatre
Ticket price: $320 (free seating)

* For the more relaxed performances on August 10, lighting and sound will be adjusted to a softer level. The house rules will also be relaxed, allowing audience members to make noise and freely enter or exit the theatre at any time during the show. A designated chill-out area outside the theatre will be available for those who need a break.

Date and time: August 16 (Saturday), 2.30pm and 4.30pm
Place: Sha Tin Town Hall Cultural Activities Hall
Ticket price: $280 and $320

Date and time: August 17 (Sunday), 2.30pm and 4.30pm
Place: Ngau Chi Wan Civic Centre Cultural Activities Hall
Ticket price: $280 and $320

     The programme contains limited English dialogue. A “Draw your dream home” post-performance activity will be held after each performance. Tickets are now available at URBTIX (www.urbtix.hk
     A “Mime Time” parent-child mime workshop will also be held on August 13 and 14. For programme enquiries and concessionary schemes, please call 2370 1044 or visit the IAC website www.hkiac.gov.hk/2025/en/home.html#programme
     This year’s IAC is running from July 11 to August 17, featuring a wide array of fun-filled educational programmes by overseas, Mainland and local art groups and artists.
Issued at HKT 17:28

NNNN

CategoriesMIL-OSI

MIL OSI Asia Pacific News –

August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI Asia-Pac: LCSD to present lecture series “Shanghai, Shanghai – A Reminiscence of Chinese Pop”

Source: Hong Kong Government special administrative region – 4

The Leisure and Cultural Services Department will launch a lecture series entitled “Shanghai, Shanghai – A Reminiscence of Chinese Pop” from October to November. The six-lecture series, curated and hosted by Dr Jim Chang, will take audiences to revisit the Chinese popular songs (or “shidaiqu”) that emerged and flourished in Shanghai from the 1920s to 1940s and remain popular nowadays, along with their iconic figures, through concise and easily comprehensible explanations. Accompanied by classic song sharing, the programme will also elaborate on the cultural ties between Shanghai and Hong Kong’s popular music scenes.

Details of each lecture are as follows:

Lecture 1: Li Jinhui and the “Minyue Concert”
——————————————————–
Date: October 21 (Tuesday)

Li Jinhui, hailed as the “Father of Chinese Popular Music”, introduced a novel genre of “sinofied jazz” to China and composed “Drizzle” (or “Mao Mao Yu”), which has been described as “the first Chinese popular song”. He also established the song and dance troupe Minyue Concert, which became a cradle for a generation of musical and cinematic stars. The speaker will introduce this great musician and his troupe, and explore their influences on the creation and development of Chinese popular music.

Lecture 2: Li Jinguang and his “Tuberose”
———————————————
Date: October 28 (Tuesday)

The “Tuberose”, composed and written by Li Jinguang, renowned as the “King of Song”, and originally sung by Li Hsiang-lan, has become a timeless hit across China and beyond with its ethereal melodies. Famous singers, including Teresa Teng, have covered this classic. The speaker will guide the audience through the fascinating origins of this evergreen masterpiece.

Lecture 3: The Romance of Chen Gexin
———————————————
Date: November 4 (Tuesday)

Chen Gexin, renowned Shanghai composer-lyricist, created timeless classics including “Rose, Rose, I love You”, “Everlasting Smile”, “Shanghai By Night”, “Gong Xi Gong Xi”, and more. The speaker will lead audiences to look back at the life of the “Immortal of Song”, whose brief 40-year lifespan left an indelible mark on old Shanghai’s popular music scene.

Lecture 4: Engrossing Shanghai Tunes
———————————————
Date: November 11 (Tuesday)

In the early 20th century, Shanghai’s music scene groomed countless renowned artists, laying the foundation for a distinguished style named “Hai pai” (Shanghai-style) in the new era. By the 1940s, artists from different backgrounds, such as the Li (Li Jinhui) School, academic schools and the Japanese War of Resistance composers, together made contributions to create a glorious decade for the popular music of old Shanghai. In this lecture, the speaker will give an overview of the music development of this period, and introduce several beloved masterpieces.

Lecture 5: The Gorgeous Li Hsiang-lan
———————————————–
Date: November 19 (Wednesday)

Coloratura soprano Li Hsiang-lan was one of the Shanghai’s “seven great singing queens” in the 1940s. Her family background, identity and growth experiences made her life truly legendary. The speaker will guide audiences to walk through the first half of the extraordinary journey of her life as a “beauty among beauties”, and to appreciate her alluring voice back in the old Shanghai period.

Lecture 6: A Tale of Two Cities
———————————————
Date: November 25 (Tuesday)

In the 1940s and 1950s, many Shanghai entrepreneurs, intellectuals and musicians moved to Hong Kong, including famous composers Li Houxiang, Yao Min, and Wang Fu-ling, bringing along the Shanghai soundscape to the city. The speaker will explore their profound impact on the development of Hong Kong’s popular music culture.

Dr Chang joined the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra as a sheng musician after graduation from university. He has been the President of the Hong Kong Library Association, and retired as the Chief Librarian of the Hong Kong Central Library. Dr Chang is currently a part-time lecturer in the Academy of Music of Hong Kong Baptist University and the Honorary Artist-in-Residence in the Department of Cultural and Creative Arts of the Education University of Hong Kong.

All lectures will be conducted in Cantonese and will start at 7.30pm in AC2, Level 4, Administration Building, Hong Kong Cultural Centre. Each lecture will run for about one hour and 30 minutes. Tickets priced at $80 (for each lecture, with free seating) are now available at URBTIX (www.urbtix.hk). For telephone bookings and concessionary schemes, please call 3166 1288. For programme enquiries, please call 2268 7321 or visit www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/CulturalService/Programme/en/music/programs_1877.html.

MIL OSI Asia Pacific News –

August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI Asia-Pac: Temporary closure of Tin Sau Road Swimming Pool

Source: Hong Kong Government special administrative region – 4

Attention TV/radio announcers:

Please broadcast the following as soon as possible and repeat it at regular intervals:

Here is an item of interest to swimmers.

The Leisure and Cultural Services Department announced today (August 1) that due to urgent maintenance works, Tin Sau Road Swimming Pool in Yuen Long District has been temporarily closed until further notice.

MIL OSI Asia Pacific News –

August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI Asia-Pac: Communications Authority press release

Source: Hong Kong Government special administrative region – 4

The following is issued on behalf of the Communications Authority:

     This press release summarises the decisions of the Communications Authority (CA) following its 144th meeting held in July 2025.

CA approves renewal application for non-domestic television programme service (non-domestic TV) licence from WarnerMedia Asia Pacific (HK) Limited
———————————————————————————————————–

     The CA approved the application from WarnerMedia Asia Pacific (HK) Limited for renewal of its non-domestic TV licence for 12 years, from October 1, 2025, to September 30, 2037 (both dates inclusive). Currently, there are nine non-domestic TV licensees providing around 150 satellite television programme channels for the Asia-Pacific region.

CA accepts commitments offered by China Mobile Hong Kong Company Limited (CMHK) in relation to proposed acquisition of HKBN Ltd by CMHK
———————————————————————————————————-

     The CA announced today (August 1) its decision to accept the commitments offered by CMHK in relation to the proposed acquisition of HKBN Ltd by CMHK (Proposed Transaction), and not to commence an investigation under the Competition Ordinance (Cap. 619) (CO).

     CMHK announced the Proposed Transaction on December 2, 2024, which falls within the scope of the Merger Rule under the CO. After conducting a competition assessment of the Proposed Transaction, the CA identified a competition issue on fixed local access network that would likely arise from the Proposed Transaction, and communicated such concern to CMHK.

     In May 2025, CMHK offered a set of commitments to the CA to address the potential competition concern arising from the Proposed Transaction (Proposed Commitments). On May 29, 2025, the CA issued a notice inviting representations from the industry and interested parties regarding its intended acceptance of the Proposed Commitments. Among others, a concern about mobile backhauls was raised by the industry in their representations. In response, CMHK offered a set of revised commitments to the CA (Revised Commitments). Having carefully considered the representations received, the Revised Commitments offered by CMHK and all relevant information, the CA is satisfied that the Revised Commitments are sufficient to effectively address the potential competition concerns arising from the Proposed Transaction. Therefore, the CA has decided to accept the Revised Commitments and not to commence an investigation on the Proposed Transaction. For more details on the CA’s decision, please refer to the CA Statement released today.

MIL OSI Asia Pacific News –

August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI: Moonshot MAGAX Presale Goes Live — Built for Virality, Fueled by Community
Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

FREMONT, Calif., Aug. 01, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — After months of building behind the scenes, Moonshot MAGAX is opening the gates. We are pleased to announce the official launch of our token presale, offering early investors a rare opportunity to invest in a community-driven token with the potential for significant growth and virality.

We’re building MAGAX for the culture, not just for the chart or hype.

What Is MAGAX?

Traditionally, memecoins are known to be a hyped token that quickly buzzes the entire ecosystem, then fade away after the hype subsides. Apart from this hype, memecoins are also perceived as unrealizable due to their rapid appreciation value among people.

But that’s exactly the narrative Moonshot MAGAX is here to challenge.

In a recent conversation with the Founder, CEO, and Creator of Moonshot MAGAX, Jatinder Pal Singh, he is rooted in experience, intention, and cultural relevance. JP is not your average crypto founder. He’s a visionary who sits at the intersection of AI, blockchain, and community. As a former senior leader at Apple, he helped shape products and AI systems that now define how millions interact with technology. Today, he brings that same level of product excellence and global mindset to Web3.

A serial entrepreneur with a passion for empowering creators, JP’s mission is simple but bold: “elevate memes beyond entertainment and turn them into meaningful, monetizable assets.”

His decision to leave Big Tech behind and go all-in on a culture-powered Web3 project speaks volumes. It shows that MAGAX wasn’t built out of hype but born out of the belief that memecoins could be more than a flash in the pan. They could represent a new form of creative and cultural capital.

MAGAX, short for “MAKE ALT COIN GREAT AGAIN XPLOSION,” is the first AI-powered Meme-to-Earn token. It merges viral content mechanics with smart contract incentives and a reward system built around creators and the community.

You’re not just investing when you engage with MAGAX. You’re stepping into a shift a transformation from memecoins as empty pumps to memecoins as real, functional tools for cultural expression and community-driven value.

With AI-powered meme discovery, MAGAX can detect viral content automatically, inviting creators and community promoters to monetise effortlessly. And it doesn’t stop at payouts this is a system designed to drive ongoing cultural relevance, where the content that connects people also fuels the platform’s growth.

And it’s not just for creators. This token isn’t creators’ alone, it is for:
1. Investors & Holders: Acquire tokens early, stake for passive growth, and benefit from long-term platform growth.
2. Early Adopters: Explore cutting-edge, decentralised AI-powered platforms early.
3. Developers & Builders: Contribute actively in growing and nurturing MAGAX’s community and ecosystem.
4. Viral Promoters: Share memes and grow reach across all social media platforms, get rewarded in MAGAX
5. Web3 Enthusiasts: Engage directly with blockchain technology, decentralised governance, and staking rewards.
Why Participate in the Pre-Sale?

By participating in the presale, you will enjoy the following:
1. Early Access, Low Price: MAGAX tokens are currently being offered at $0.00027 USDT per token, with a minimum purchase of $20. As the stages progress, this price has the potential to increase to $0.00061 or more.
2. Token Utility with Real Rewards: With MAGAX tokens, you gain governance rights in the MAGAX DAO, the ability to license viral memes and advertisement spaces, and you can earn rewards for referring others.
3. Vesting Mechanisms for Stability: To prevent rug pull after launch, only 20% of your presale tokens are unlocked on launch, with the remaining 80% vested over 12 months. This encourages long-term alignment, ecosystem health, as well as security.
4. Built for Memes and Viral Culture: MAGAX uniquely rewards meme creators, early amplifiers, and community members based on real engagement driven by AI and on-chain transparency
How to Participate in the Pre-sale?
1. Visit MAGAX LaunchPad
2. Connect your wallet using the available supported wallet options.
3. Choose any coin of your choice to pay with, e.g ETH, USDT, BTC
4. Enter the amount you’re buying
5. Confirm and you’re in.
Memes aren’t just jokes. They’re assets. And it’s time the people behind them get rewarded.

Let’s preserve the culture. Let’s empower community growth

Media Details

Contact: Moonshot Magax

Email: Support@moonshotmagax.com

Website: https://www.moonshotmagax.com/

Whitepaper: https://magax-dev-public-bucket.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/pdfs/Whitepaper.pdf

Telegram: https://t.me/moonshotmagax

Twitter (X): https://x.com/moonshotmagax

Disclaimer: This press release is provided by Moonshot Magax. The statements, views, and opinions expressed in this content are solely those of the content provider and do not necessarily reflect the views of this media platform or its publisher. We do not endorse, verify, or guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of any information presented. This content is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial, investment, or trading advice. Investing in crypto and mining related opportunities involves significant risks, including the potential loss of capital. Readers are strongly encouraged to conduct their own research and consult with a qualified financial advisor before making any investment decisions. However, due to the inherently speculative nature of the blockchain sector–including cryptocurrency, NFTs, and mining–complete accuracy cannot always be guaranteed. Neither the media platform nor the publisher shall be held responsible for any fraudulent activities, misrepresentations, or financial losses arising from the content of this press release. Speculate only with funds that you can afford to lose. In the event of any legal claims or charges against this article, we accept no liability or responsibility.

Legal Disclaimer: This media platform provides the content of this article on an “as-is” basis, without any warranties or representations of any kind, express or implied. We do not assume any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information presented herein. Any concerns, complaints, or copyright issues related to this article should be directed to the content provider mentioned above.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/5502a42b-8286-4a09-9c61-c57ff4fc9b26

The MIL Network –
August 5, 2025

MIL-OSI: Brookfield Business Partners Reports Second Quarter 2025 Results

Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

BROOKFIELD, NEWS, Aug. 01, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Brookfield Business Partners (NYSE: BBU, BBUC; TSX: BBU.UN, BBUC) announced today financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2025.

“We had an active quarter, reaching an agreement on the sale of a partial interest in three businesses, investing $300 million to acquire two market-leading businesses, and repurchasing an additional 2.2 million of common equity at highly accretive levels,” said Anuj Ranjan, CEO of Brookfield Business Partners. “The strength of our financial results in an uneven macroeconomic environment underscores the resilience of our operations, while progress on our value creation plans and capital recycling initiatives enable us to continue compounding growth for investors.”

	Three Months Ended June 30,					Six Months Ended June 30,
US$ millions (except per unit amounts), unaudited		2025		2024			2025		2024
Net income (loss) attributable to Unitholders¹	$	26	$	(20	)	$	106	$	28
Net income (loss) per limited partnership unit²	$	*0.12*	$	(0.10	)	$	*0.49*	$	0.13

Adjusted EBITDA³	$	591	$	524		$	1,182	$	1,068

Net income attributable to Unitholders for the three months ended June 30, 2025 was $26 million ($0.12 per limited partnership unit), compared to net loss of $20 million (loss of $0.10 per limited partnership unit) in the prior period.

Adjusted EBITDA for the three months ended June 30, 2025 was $591 million, compared to $524 million in the prior period reflecting increased performance on a same store basis and contribution from recently completed acquisitions. Prior period results included $71 million of contribution from disposed operations including our offshore oil services’ shuttle tanker operation which was sold in January 2025.

Operational Update

The following table presents Adjusted EBITDA by segment:

	Three Months Ended June 30,						Six Months Ended June 30,
US$ millions, unaudited		2025			2024			2025			2024
Industrials	$	307		$	213		$	611		$	441
Business Services		205			182			418			387
Infrastructure Services		109			157			213			300
Corporate and Other		(30	)		(28	)		(60	)		(60	)
Adjusted EBITDA	$	591		$	524		$	1,182		$	1,068

Our Industrials segment generated Adjusted EBITDA of $307 million for the three months ended June 30, 2025, compared to $213 million during the same period in 2024, benefiting from strong operating performance at our advanced energy storage operation. Current period results included $71 million of tax recoveries as well as contribution from recent acquisitions including our electric heat tracing systems manufacturer which was acquired in January 2025. Prior period results included contribution from our Canadian aggregates production operation which was sold in June 2024.

Our Business Services segment generated Adjusted EBITDA of $205 million for the three months ended June 30, 2025, compared to $182 million during the same period in 2024 which reflected the impact of reduced contribution from our dealer software and technology services operation in the prior period. Prior period results included contribution from our road fuels operation which was sold in July 2024.

Our Infrastructure Services segment generated Adjusted EBITDA of $109 million for the three months ended June 30, 2025, compared to $157 million during the same period in 2024 primarily reflecting the sale of our offshore oil services’ shuttle tanker operation in January 2025.

The following table presents Adjusted EFO⁴ by segment:

	Three Months Ended June 30,						Six Months Ended June 30,
US$ millions, unaudited		2025			2024			2025			2024
Adjusted EFO
Industrials	$	154		$	206		$	284		$	386
Business Services		105			86			222			254
Infrastructure Services		38			76			204			148
Corporate and Other		(63	)		(79	)		(131	)		(168	)

Adjusted EFO included the benefit of lower interest expense due to a reduction in corporate borrowings compared to the prior period. Industrials Adjusted EFO reflected the impact of higher interest expense related to the funding of a distribution received from our advanced energy storage operation during the current year. Adjusted EFO in the prior period included $103 million of net gains related to the disposition of our Canadian aggregates production operation and the sale of public securities.

Strategic Initiatives

Capital Recycling
In July, we completed the previously announced sale of a partial interest in three businesses to a new evergreen private equity fund managed by Brookfield Asset Management. In exchange, BBU will receive units of the new evergreen fund with an initial redemption value of approximately $690 million, representing an aggregate 8.6% discount to net asset value (NAV) of the interests sold. In the 18-month period following the initial close of the new evergreen fund, the units are expected to be redeemed for cash.

Canadian Mortgage Lender
In July, we entered into a partnership to privatize First National Financial Corporation, a leading publicly-listed Canadian residential and multi-family mortgage lender, for $2.7 billion. The transaction is expected to be funded with approximately $1.3 billion of equity, of which BBU’s share is expected to be approximately $145 million for an 11% interest in the business. The transaction is expected to close later this year, subject to obtaining the required shareholder, court and regulatory approvals and the satisfaction of other customary closing conditions.

Specialty Consumables and Equipment Manufacturer
In May, we completed the previously announced acquisition of Antylia Scientific, a leading manufacturer and distributor of critical consumables and testing equipment serving life sciences and environmental labs for approximately $1.3 billion. BBU invested $168 million for a 26% interest.

Unit Repurchase Program
During the quarter, we invested $56 million to repurchase 2.2 million units and shares of Brookfield Business Partners at an average price of approximately $25 per unit and share. Since the start of the year, our buyback program has returned $157 million to owners through the repurchase of 6.5 million units and shares under our normal course issuer bid (NCIB), which we plan to renew once it expires later this month.

Liquidity

We ended the quarter with approximately $2.3 billion of liquidity at the corporate level, including $2.2 billion of availability on our credit facilities. Pro forma for announced and recently closed transactions, corporate liquidity is approximately $2.9 billion.

Distribution

The Board of Directors has declared a quarterly distribution in the amount of $0.0625 per unit, payable on September 29, 2025 to unitholders of record as at the close of business on August 29, 2025.

Additional Information

The Board has reviewed and approved this news release, including the summarized unaudited interim condensed consolidated financial statements contained herein.

Brookfield Business Partners’ Letter to Unitholders and the Supplemental Information are available on our website https://bbu.brookfield.com under Reports & Filings.

^{Notes:
1 Attributable to limited partnership unitholders, general partnership unitholders, redemption-exchange unitholders, special limited partnership unitholders and BBUC exchangeable shareholders.
2 Net income (loss) per limited partnership unit calculated as net income (loss) attributable to limited partners divided by the average number of limited partnership units outstanding for the three and six months ended June 30, 2025 which were 88.9 million and 84.5 million, respectively (June 30, 2024: 74.3 million and 74.3 million, respectively).
3 Adjusted EBITDA is a non-IFRS measure of operating performance presented as net income and equity accounted income at the partnership’s economic ownership interest in consolidated subsidiaries and equity accounted investments, respectively, excluding the impact of interest income (expense), net, income taxes, depreciation and amortization expense, gains (losses) on dispositions, net, transaction costs, restructuring charges, revaluation gains or losses, impairment expenses or reversals, other income or expenses, and preferred equity distributions. The partnership’s economic ownership interest in consolidated subsidiaries and equity accounted investments excludes amounts attributable to non-controlling interests consistent with how the partnership determines net income attributable to non-controlling interests in its unaudited interim condensed consolidated statements of operating results. The partnership believes that Adjusted EBITDA provides a comprehensive understanding of the ability of its businesses to generate recurring earnings which allows users to better understand and evaluate the underlying financial performance of the partnership’s operations and excludes items that the partnership believes do not directly relate to revenue earning activities and are not normal, recurring items necessary for business operations. Please refer to the reconciliation of net income (loss) to Adjusted EBITDA included in this news release.
4 Adjusted EFO is the partnership’s segment measure of profit or loss and is presented as net income and equity accounted income at the partnership’s economic ownership interest in consolidated subsidiaries and equity accounted investments, respectively, excluding the impact of depreciation and amortization expense, deferred income taxes, transaction costs, restructuring charges, unrealized revaluation gains or losses, impairment expenses or reversals and other income or expense items that are not directly related to revenue generating activities. The partnership’s economic ownership interest in consolidated subsidiaries excludes amounts attributable to non-controlling interests consistent with how the partnership determines net income attributable to non-controlling interests in its unaudited interim condensed consolidated statements of operating results. In order to provide additional insight regarding the partnership’s operating performance over the lifecycle of an investment, Adjusted EFO includes the impact of preferred equity distributions and realized disposition gains or losses recorded in net income, other comprehensive income, or directly in equity, such as ownership changes. Adjusted EFO does not include legal and other provisions that may occur from time to time in the partnership’s operations and that are one-time or non-recurring and not directly tied to the partnership’s operations, such as those for litigation or contingencies. Adjusted EFO includes expected credit losses and bad debt allowances recorded in the normal course of the partnership’s operations. Adjusted EFO allows the partnership to evaluate its segments on the basis of return on invested capital generated by its operations and allows the partnership to evaluate the performance of its segments on a levered basis.}

Brookfield Business Partners is a global business services and industrials company focused on owning and operating high-quality businesses that provide essential products and services and benefit from a strong competitive position. Investors have flexibility to invest in our company either through Brookfield Business Partners L.P. (NYSE: BBU; TSX: BBU.UN), a limited partnership or Brookfield Business Corporation (NYSE, TSX: BBUC), a corporation. For more information, please visit https://bbu.brookfield.com.

Brookfield Business Partners is the flagship listed vehicle of Brookfield Asset Management’s Private Equity Group. Brookfield Asset Management is a leading global alternative asset manager with over $1 trillion of assets under management.

Please note that Brookfield Business Partners’ previous audited annual and unaudited quarterly reports have been filed on SEDAR+ and EDGAR, and are available at https://bbu.brookfield.com under Reports & Filings. Hard copies of the annual and quarterly reports can be obtained free of charge upon request.

For more information, please contact:

Conference Call and Quarterly Earnings Webcast Details

Investors, analysts and other interested parties can access Brookfield Business Partners’ second quarter 2025 results as well as the Letter to Unitholders and Supplemental Information on our website https://bbu.brookfield.com under Reports & Filings.

The results call can be accessed via webcast on August 1, 2025 at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time at BBU2025Q2Webcast or participants can preregister at BBU2025Q2ConferenceCall. Upon registering, participants will be emailed a dial-in number and unique PIN. A replay of the webcast will be available at https://bbu.brookfield.com.

Brookfield Business Partners L.P.
Consolidated Statements of Financial Position

	As at
US$ millions, unaudited	June 30, 2025				December 31, 2024

Assets
Cash and cash equivalents			$	3,329			$	3,239
Financial assets				11,658				12,371
Accounts and other receivable, net				7,148				6,279
Inventory and other assets				5,808				5,728
Property, plant and equipment				10,591				13,232
Deferred income tax assets				1,959				1,744
Intangible assets				19,158				18,317
Equity accounted investments				2,397				2,325
Goodwill				13,287				12,239
Total Assets			$	75,335			$	75,474

Liabilities and Equity
Liabilities
Corporate borrowings			$	1,116			$	2,142
Accounts payable and other				13,766				16,691
Non-recourse borrowings in subsidiaries of the partnership				42,493				36,720
Deferred income tax liabilities				2,639				2,613

Equity
Limited partners	$	2,291			$	1,752
Non-controlling interests attributable to:
Redemption-exchange units		1,330				1,644
Special limited partner		—				—
BBUC exchangeable shares		1,805				1,721
Preferred securities		740				740
Interest of others in operating subsidiaries		9,155				11,451
				15,321				17,308
Total Liabilities and Equity			$	75,335			$	75,474

Brookfield Business Partners L.P.
Consolidated Statements of Operating Results

US$ millions, unaudited	Three Months Ended June 30,						Six Months Ended June 30,
US$ millions, unaudited		2025			2024			2025			2024

Revenues	$	6,695		$	11,946		$	13,444		$	23,961
Direct operating costs		(5,465	)		(10,928	)		(10,867	)		(21,806	)
General and administrative expenses		(271	)		(307	)		(582	)		(624	)
Interest income (expense), net		(801	)		(778	)		(1,571	)		(1,574	)
Equity accounted income (loss)		23			31			15			54
Impairment reversal (expense), net		(14	)		—			(14	)		10
Gain (loss) on dispositions, net		6			84			220			99
Other income (expense), net		(103	)		(100	)		(186	)		16
Income (loss) before income tax		70			(52	)		459			136
Income tax (expense) recovery
Current		(119	)		(122	)		(316	)		(212	)
Deferred		184			239			248			344
Net income (loss)	$	135		$	65		$	391		$	268
Attributable to:
Limited partners	$	11		$	(7	)	$	41		$	10
Non-controlling interests attributable to:
Redemption-exchange units		6			(6	)		29			9
Special limited partner		—			—			—			—
BBUC exchangeable shares		9			(7	)		36			9
Preferred securities		13			13			26			26
Interest of others in operating subsidiaries		96			72			259			214

Brookfield Business Partners L.P.
Reconciliation of Non-IFRS Measure

US$ millions, unaudited	Three Months Ended June 30, 2025
US$ millions, unaudited	Business Services			Infrastructure Services			Industrials			Corporate and Other			Total

Net income (loss)	$	253		$	(173	)	$	95		$	(40	)	$	135

Add or subtract the following:
Depreciation and amortization expense		208			175			384			—			767
Impairment reversal (expense), net		—			—			14			—			14
Gain (loss) on dispositions, net		(6	)		—			—			—			(6	)
Other income (expense), net¹		(200	)		76			229			(2	)		103
Income tax (expense) recovery		9			10			(76	)		(8	)		(65	)
Equity accounted income (loss)		(5	)		(4	)		(14	)		—			(23	)
Interest income (expense), net		238			142			401			20			801
Equity accounted Adjusted EBITDA²		28			40			20			—			88
Amounts attributable to non-controlling interests³		(320	)		(157	)		(746	)		—			(1,223	)
Adjusted EBITDA	$	205		$	109		$	307		$	(30	)	$	591

^{Notes:
1 Other income (expense), net corresponds to amounts that are not directly related to revenue earning activities and are not normal, recurring income or expenses necessary for business operations. The components of other income (expense), net include $236 million of net gain recognized upon the deconsolidation of our healthcare services operation, $183 million of expenses related to employee incentive payments linked to the realization of value at our advanced energy storage operation, $59 million of net revaluation losses, $57 million of business separation expenses, stand-up costs and restructuring charges, $19 million of net loss on debt modification and extinguishment, $3 million of transaction costs and $18 million of other expenses.
2 Equity accounted Adjusted EBITDA corresponds to the Adjusted EBITDA attributable to the partnership that is generated by its investments in associates and joint ventures accounted for using the equity method.
3 Amounts attributable to non-controlling interests are calculated based on the economic ownership interests held by the non-controlling interests in consolidated subsidiaries.}

Brookfield Business Partners L.P.
Reconciliation of Non-IFRS Measure

US$ millions, unaudited	Six Months Ended June 30, 2025
US$ millions, unaudited	Business Services			Infrastructure Services			Industrials			Corporate and Other			Total

Net income (loss)	$	253		$	(17	)	$	240		$	(85	)	$	391

Add or subtract the following:
Depreciation and amortization expense		430			340			727			—			1,497
Impairment reversal (expense), net		—			—			14			—			14
Gain (loss) on dispositions, net		(6	)		(214	)		—			—			(220	)
Other income (expense), net¹		(132	)		(3	)		322			(1	)		186
Income tax (expense) recovery		27			35			25			(19	)		68
Equity accounted income (loss)		(8	)		22			(29	)		—			(15	)
Interest income (expense), net		468			291			767			45			1,571
Equity accounted Adjusted EBITDA²		52			73			35			—			160
Amounts attributable to non-controlling interests³		(666	)		(314	)		(1,490	)		—			(2,470	)
Adjusted EBITDA	$	418		$	213		$	611		$	(60	)	$	1,182

^{Notes:
1 Other income (expense), net corresponds to amounts that are not directly related to revenue earning activities and are not normal, recurring income or expenses necessary for business operations. The components of other income (expense), net include $236 million of net gain recognized upon the deconsolidation of our healthcare services operation, $183 million of expenses related to employee incentive payments linked to the realization of value at our advanced energy storage operation, $135 million of business separation expenses, stand-up costs and restructuring charges, $125 million of unrealized gains recorded on reclassification of property, plant and equipment to finance leases at our offshore oil services operation, $110 million of net revaluation losses, $38 million of transaction costs, $22 million of net loss on debt modification and extinguishment and $59 million of other expenses.
2 Equity accounted Adjusted EBITDA corresponds to the Adjusted EBITDA attributable to the partnership that is generated by our investments in associates and joint ventures accounted for using the equity method.
3 Amounts attributable to non-controlling interests are calculated based on the economic ownership interests held by the non-controlling interests in consolidated subsidiaries.}

Brookfield Business Partners L.P.
Reconciliation of Non-IFRS Measure

US$ millions, unaudited	Three Months Ended June 30, 2024
US$ millions, unaudited	Business Services			Infrastructure Services			Industrials			Corporate and Other			Total

Net income (loss)	$	(5	)	$	(92	)	$	216		$	(54	)	$	65

Add back or deduct the following:
Depreciation and amortization expense		248			222			339			—			809
Gain (loss) on dispositions, net		—			—			(84	)		—			(84	)
Other income (expense), net¹		51			22			26			1			100
Income tax expense (recovery)		(17	)		4			(91	)		(13	)		(117	)
Equity accounted income (loss)		(5	)		(11	)		(15	)		—			(31	)
Interest income (expense), net		253			178			309			38			778
Equity accounted Adjusted EBITDA²		18			44			15			—			77
Amounts attributable to non-controlling interests³		(361	)		(210	)		(502	)		—			(1,073	)
Adjusted EBITDA	$	182		$	157		$	213		$	(28	)	$	524

^{Notes:
1 Other income (expense), net corresponds to amounts that are not directly related to revenue earning activities and are not normal, recurring income or expenses necessary for business operations. The components of other income (expense), net include $82 million related to provisions recorded at our construction operation, $49 million of net gains on debt modification and extinguishment, $41 million of business separation expenses, stand-up costs, and restructuring charges, $21 million of net revaluation gains, $8 million of transaction costs and $39 million of other expenses.
2 Equity accounted Adjusted EBITDA corresponds to the Adjusted EBITDA attributable to the partnership that is generated by our investments in associates and joint ventures accounted for using the equity method.
3 Amounts attributable to non-controlling interests are calculated based on the economic ownership interests held by the non-controlling interests in consolidated subsidiaries.}

Brookfield Business Partners L.P.
Reconciliation of Non-IFRS Measure

US$ millions, unaudited	Six Months Ended June 30, 2024
US$ millions, unaudited	Business Services			Infrastructure Services			Industrials			Corporate and Other			Total

Net income (loss)	$	235		$	(157	)	$	314		$	(124	)	$	268

Add back or deduct the following:
Depreciation and amortization expense		502			434			681			—			1,617
Impairment reversal (expense), net		(4	)		(12	)		6			—			(10	)
Gain (loss) on dispositions, net		(15	)		—			(84	)		—			(99	)
Other income (expense), net¹		(89	)		4			58			11			(16	)
Income tax expense (recovery)		7			1			(118	)		(22	)		(132	)
Equity accounted income (loss), net		(6	)		(15	)		(33	)		—			(54	)
Interest income (expense), net		505			358			636			75			1,574
Equity accounted Adjusted EBITDA²		35			83			31			—			149
Amounts attributable to non-controlling interests³		(783	)		(396	)		(1,050	)		—			(2,229	)
Adjusted EBITDA	$	387		$	300		$	441		$	(60	)	$	1,068

^{Notes:
1 Other income (expense), net corresponds to amounts that are not directly related to revenue earning activities and are not normal, recurring income or expenses necessary for business operations. The components of other income (expense), net include $179 million of net revaluation gains, $82 million related to provisions recorded at our construction operation, $61 million of business separation expenses, stand-up costs and restructuring charges, $50 million of other income related to a distribution at our entertainment operation, $38 million of net gains on debt modification and extinguishment, $29 million of transaction costs and $79 million of other expenses.
2 Equity accounted Adjusted EBITDA corresponds to the Adjusted EBITDA attributable to the partnership that is generated by our investments in associates and joint ventures accounted for using the equity method.
3 Amounts attributable to non-controlling interests are calculated based on the economic ownership interests held by the non-controlling interests in consolidated subsidiaries.}

Brookfield Business Corporation Reports Second Quarter 2025 Results

Brookfield, News, August 1, 2025 – Brookfield Business Corporation (NYSE, TSX: BBUC) announced today its net income (loss) for the quarter ended June 30, 2025.

	Three Months Ended June 30,					Six Months Ended June 30,
US$ millions, unaudited		2025			2024		2025			2024

Net income (loss) attributable to Brookfield Business Partners	$	(120	)	$	124	$	(178	)	$	(26	)

Net loss attributable to Brookfield Business Partners for the three months ended June 30, 2025 was $120 million, compared to net income of $124 million during the same period in 2024. Current period results included $176 million of remeasurement loss on our exchangeable and class B shares that are classified as liabilities under IFRS and a net gain recognized upon the deconsolidation of our healthcare services operation due to loss of control. Prior period results reflect the impact of reduced contribution from our construction operation. As at June 30, 2025, the exchangeable and class B shares were remeasured to reflect the closing price of $25.93 per unit.

Dividend

The Board of Directors has declared a quarterly dividend in the amount of $0.0625 per share, payable on September 29, 2025 to shareholders of record as at the close of business on August 29, 2025.

Additional Information

Each exchangeable share of Brookfield Business Corporation has been structured with the intention of providing an economic return equivalent to one unit of Brookfield Business Partners L.P. Each exchangeable share will be exchangeable at the option of the holder for one unit. Brookfield Business Corporation will target that dividends on its exchangeable shares be declared and paid at the same time as distributions are declared and paid on the Brookfield Business Partners’ units and that dividends on each exchangeable share will be declared and paid in the same amount as distributions are declared and paid on each unit to provide holders of exchangeable shares with an economic return equivalent to holders of units.

In addition to carefully considering the disclosures made in this news release in its entirety, shareholders are strongly encouraged to carefully review the Letter to Unitholders, Supplemental Information and other continuous disclosure filings which are available at https://bbu.brookfield.com.

Please note that Brookfield Business Corporation’s previous audited annual and unaudited quarterly reports have been filed on SEDAR+ and EDGAR and are available at https://bbu.brookfield.com/bbuc under Reports & Filings. Hard copies of the annual and quarterly reports can be obtained free of charge upon request.

Brookfield Business Corporation
Consolidated Statements of Financial Position

	As at
US$ millions, unaudited	June 30, 2025					December 31, 2024

Assets
Cash and cash equivalents				$	613				$	1,008
Financial assets					290					353
Accounts and other receivable, net					3,234					3,229
Inventory, net					26					52
Other assets					517					627
Property, plant and equipment					181					2,480
Deferred income tax assets					236					197
Intangible assets					5,980					5,966
Equity accounted investments					187					198
Goodwill					5,018					4,988
Total Assets				$	16,282				$	19,098

Liabilities and Equity
Liabilities
Accounts payable and other				$	2,981				$	5,276
Non-recourse borrowings in subsidiaries of the company					7,940					8,490
Exchangeable and class B shares					1,815					1,709
Deferred income tax liabilities					967					988

Equity
Brookfield Business Partners	$	(159	)			$	(59	)
Non-controlling interests		2,738					2,694
					2,579					2,635
Total Liabilities and Equity				$	16,282				$	19,098

Brookfield Business Corporation
Consolidated Statements of Operating Results

US$ millions, unaudited	Three Months Ended June 30,						Six Months Ended June 30,
US$ millions, unaudited		2025			2024			2025			2024

Revenues	$	1,860		$	1,929		$	3,826		$	3,794
Direct operating costs		(1,695	)		(1,860	)		(3,484	)		(3,512	)
General and administrative expenses		(69	)		(77	)		(144	)		(141	)
Interest income (expense), net		(212	)		(203	)		(431	)		(413	)
Equity accounted income (loss)		2			2			5			3
Impairment reversal (expense), net		—			—			—			(2	)
Remeasurement of exchangeable and class B shares		(176	)		237			(183	)		126
Other income (expense), net		236			(59	)		202			(70	)
Income (loss) before income tax		(54	)		(31	)		(209	)		(215	)
Income tax (expense) recovery
Current		14			16			(9	)		(28	)
Deferred		17			55			60			109
Net income (loss)	$	(23	)	$	40		$	(158	)	$	(134	)
Attributable to:
Brookfield Business Partners		(120	)		124			(178	)		(26	)
Non-controlling interests	$	97		$	(84	)	$	20		$	(108	)

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-looking Statements and Information

Note: This news release contains “forward-looking information” within the meaning of Canadian provincial securities laws and “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of applicable Canadian and U.S. securities laws. Forward-looking statements include statements that are predictive in nature, depend upon or refer to future events or conditions, include statements regarding the operations, business, financial condition, expected financial results, performance, prospects, opportunities, priorities, targets, goals, ongoing objectives, strategies and outlook of Brookfield Business Partners, as well as regarding recently completed and proposed acquisitions, dispositions, and other transactions, and the outlook for North American and international economies for the current fiscal year and subsequent periods, and include words such as “expects”, “anticipates”, “plans”, “believes”, “estimates”, “seeks”, “intends”, “targets”, “projects”, “forecasts”, “views”, “potential”, “likely” or negative versions thereof and other similar expressions, or future or conditional verbs such as “may”, “will”, “should”, “would” and “could”.

Although we believe that our anticipated future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements and information are based upon reasonable assumptions and expectations, investors and other readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements and information because they involve assumptions, known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, many of which are beyond our control, which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of Brookfield Business Partners to differ materially from anticipated future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and information. These beliefs, assumptions and expectations can change as a result of many possible events or factors, not all of which are known to us or are within our control. If a change occurs, our business, financial condition, liquidity and results of operations and our plans and strategies may vary materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements and forward-looking information herein.

Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated or implied by forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, the following: the cyclical nature of our operating businesses and general economic conditions and risks relating to the economy, including unfavorable changes in interest rates, foreign exchange rates, inflation, commodity prices and volatility in the financial markets; the ability to complete and effectively integrate acquisitions into existing operations and the ability to attain expected benefits; business competition, including competition for acquisition opportunities; strategic actions including our ability to complete dispositions and achieve the anticipated benefits therefrom; global equity and capital markets and the availability of equity and debt financing and refinancing within these markets; changes to U.S. laws or policies, including changes in U.S. domestic and economic policies as well as foreign trade policies and tariffs; technological change; litigation; cybersecurity incidents; the possible impact of international conflicts, wars and related developments including terrorist acts and cyber terrorism; operational, or business risks that are specific to any of our business services operations, infrastructure services operations or industrials operations; changes in government policy and legislation; catastrophic events, such as earthquakes, hurricanes and pandemics/epidemics; changes in tax law and practice; and other risks and factors detailed from time to time in our documents filed with the securities regulators in Canada and the United States including those set forth in the “Risk Factors” section in our annual report for the year ended December 31, 2024 filed on Form 20-F.

Statements relating to “reserves” are deemed to be forward-looking statements as they involve the implied assessment, based on certain estimates and assumptions, that the reserves described herein can be profitably produced in the future. We qualify any and all of our forward-looking statements by these cautionary factors.

We caution that the foregoing list of important factors that may affect future results is not exhaustive. When relying on our forward-looking statements and information, investors and others should carefully consider the foregoing factors and other uncertainties and potential events. Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements or information, whether written or oral, that may be as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Cautionary Statement Regarding the Use of a Non-IFRS Measure

This news release contains references to a Non-IFRS measure. Adjusted EBITDA is not a generally accepted accounting measure under IFRS and therefore may differ from definitions used by other entities. We believe this is a useful supplemental measure that may assist investors in assessing the financial performance of Brookfield Business Partners and its subsidiaries. However, Adjusted EBITDA should not be considered in isolation from, or as a substitute for, analysis of our financial statements prepared in accordance with IFRS.

References to Brookfield Business Partners are to Brookfield Business Partners L.P. together with its subsidiaries, controlled affiliates and operating entities. Unitholders’ results include limited partnership units, redemption-exchange units, general partnership units, BBUC exchangeable shares and special limited partnership units. More detailed information on certain references made in this news release will be available in our Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations in our interim report for the second quarter ended June 30, 2025 furnished on Form 6-K.

The MIL Network –

August 5, 2025

MIL-OSI: NANO Nuclear Selected for Inclusion in the Solactive Global Uranium & Nuclear Components Total Return Index, Qualifying It for Inclusion in the Prominent Global X Uranium ETF (“URA”)

Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

With over $4 billion in net assets, the Global X Uranium ETF is the world’s preeminent ETF providing investors broad exposure to companies involved in uranium mining and the production of nuclear components

New York, N.Y., Aug. 01, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — NANO Nuclear Energy Inc. (NASDAQ: NNE) (“NANO Nuclear” or “the Company”), a leading advanced nuclear energy and technology company focused on developing clean energy solutions, today announced that it has been selected for inclusion in the Solactive Global Uranium & Nuclear Components Total Return Index, following the Index’s semiannual review and subsequent rebalancing.

Effective as of August 1, 2025, NANO Nuclear’s common stock will be included in the Solactive Global Uranium & Nuclear Components Total Return Index, an Index of Solactive AG which tracks the price movements in shares of companies that have (or are expected to have) exposure to the uranium industry. This particularly includes uranium mining, exploration, uranium investments and technologies (such as NANO Nuclear’s micro modular nuclear reactors under development) related to the uranium industry

The Solactive Global Uranium & Nuclear Components Total Return Index serves as a benchmark for exchange-traded funds (or ETFs) and other investment products, with NANO Nuclear’s inclusion reflecting its growing presence in the global nuclear energy and uranium supply chain.

As a result of this addition, NANO Nuclear’s common stock now qualifies for inclusion in the prominent Global X Uranium ETF (ticker “URA”), with approximately $4 billion in net assets, which passively tracks the Solactive Global Uranium & Nuclear Components Total Return Index. Notably, the Global X Uranium ETF is the world’s preeminent ETF providing investors broad exposure to companies involved in uranium mining and the production of nuclear components.

Figure 1 – NANO Nuclear Energy Inc. Selected for inclusion in the Solactive Global Uranium & Nuclear Components Total Return Index, qualifying it for inclusion in the prominent Global X Uranium ETF (“URA”)

“Our team has executed well on our stated strategic priorities, strengthening our market position and building collaborations that support our long‑term growth and valuation,” said Jay Yu, Founder and Chairman of NANO Nuclear. “Inclusion in Solactive’s Global Uranium & Nuclear Components Total Return Index and the Global X Uranium ETF marks these achievements and is another positive step in our trajectory, highlighting our expanding role in the global nuclear energy industry. It is a testament to the hard work being done by our team to steadily grow our company, advance our technologies, and deliver value to our shareholders both now and in the future.”

“This is an important milestone for NANO Nuclear, and we are proud to be included in Solactive’s coverage of the nuclear and uranium industry,” said James Walker, Chief Executive Officer of NANO Nuclear. “We continue to take proactive steps to advance NANO Nuclear’s various development programs and initiatives and create shareholder value. This inclusion increases our visibility in the public markets and connects us with investors who are interested in this growing sector. We look forward to leveraging this exposure as we continue to grow and progress our business plans.”

About NANO Nuclear Energy, Inc.

NANO Nuclear Energy Inc. (NASDAQ: NNE) is an advanced technology-driven nuclear energy company seeking to become a commercially focused, diversified, and vertically integrated company across five business lines: (i) cutting edge portable and other microreactor technologies, (ii) nuclear fuel fabrication, (iii) nuclear fuel transportation, (iv) nuclear applications for space and (v) nuclear industry consulting services. NANO Nuclear believes it is the first portable nuclear microreactor company to be listed publicly in the U.S.

Led by a world-class nuclear engineering team, NANO Nuclear’s reactor products in development include patented KRONOS MMR^™Energy System, a stationary high-temperature gas-cooled reactor that is in construction permit pre-application engagement U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in collaboration with University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U. of I.), “ZEUS”, a solid core battery reactor, and “ODIN”, a low-pressure coolant reactor, and the space focused, portable LOKI MMR^™, each representing advanced developments in clean energy solutions that are portable, on-demand capable, advanced nuclear microreactors.

Advanced Fuel Transportation Inc. (AFT), a NANO Nuclear subsidiary, is led by former executives from the largest transportation company in the world aiming to build a North American transportation company that will provide commercial quantities of HALEU fuel to small modular reactors, microreactor companies, national laboratories, military, and DOE programs. Through NANO Nuclear, AFT is the exclusive licensee of a patented high-capacity HALEU fuel transportation basket developed by three major U.S. national nuclear laboratories and funded by the Department of Energy. Assuming development and commercialization, AFT is expected to form part of the only vertically integrated nuclear fuel business of its kind in North America.

HALEU Energy Fuel Inc. (HEF), a NANO Nuclear subsidiary, is focusing on the future development of a domestic source for a High-Assay, Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU) fuel fabrication pipeline for NANO Nuclear’s own microreactors as well as the broader advanced nuclear reactor industry.

NANO Nuclear Space Inc. (NNS), a NANO Nuclear subsidiary, is exploring the potential commercial applications of NANO Nuclear’s developing micronuclear reactor technology in space. NNS is focusing on applications such as the LOKI MMR^™ system and other power systems for extraterrestrial projects and human sustaining environments, and potentially propulsion technology for long haul space missions. NNS’ initial focus will be on cis-lunar applications, referring to uses in the space region extending from Earth to the area surrounding the Moon’s surface.

For more corporate information please visit: https://NanoNuclearEnergy.com/

For further NANO Nuclear information, please contact:

Email: IR@NANONuclearEnergy.com
Business Tel: (212) 634-9206

PLEASE FOLLOW OUR SOCIAL MEDIA PAGES HERE:

NANO Nuclear Energy LINKEDIN
NANO Nuclear Energy YOUTUBE
NANO Nuclear Energy X PLATFORM

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward Looking Statements

This news release and statements of NANO Nuclear’s management in connection with this news release contain or may contain “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. In this context, forward-looking statements mean statements related to future events, which may impact our expected future business and financial performance, and often contain words such as “expects”, “anticipates”, “intends”, “plans”, “believes”, “potential”, “will”, “should”, “could”, “would” or “may” and other words of similar meaning. In this press release, forward-looking statements relate to the anticipated benefits of NANO Nuclear’s inclusion in the index and ETF described herein and its plans and goals generally. These and other forward-looking statements are based on information available to us as of the date of this news release and represent management’s current views and assumptions. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, events or results and involve significant known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which may be beyond our control. For NANO Nuclear, particular risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual future results to differ materially from those expressed in our forward-looking statements include but are not limited to the following: (i) risks related to our U.S. Department of Energy (“DOE”) or related state or non-U.S. nuclear licensing submissions, (ii) risks related the development of new or advanced technology and the acquisition of complimentary technology or businesses, including difficulties with design and testing, cost overruns, regulatory delays, integration issues and the development of competitive technology, (iii) our ability to obtain contracts and funding to be able to continue operations, (iv) risks related to uncertainty regarding our ability to technologically develop and commercially deploy a competitive advanced nuclear reactor or other technology in the timelines we anticipate, if ever, (v) risks related to the impact of U.S. and non-U.S. government regulation, policies and licensing requirements, including by the DOE and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, including those associated with the recently enacted ADVANCE Act and the May 23, 2025 Executive Orders seeking to streamline nuclear regulation, and (vi) similar risks and uncertainties associated with the operating an early stage business a highly regulated and rapidly evolving industry. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which apply only as of the date of this news release. These factors may not constitute all factors that could cause actual results to differ from those discussed in any forward-looking statement, and NANO Nuclear therefore encourages investors to review other factors that may affect future results in its filings with the SEC, which are available for review at www.sec.gov and at https://ir.nanonuclearenergy.com/financial-information/sec-filings. Accordingly, forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as a predictor of actual results. We do not undertake to update our forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances that may arise after the date of this news release, except as required by law.

Attachment

The MIL Network –

August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI: OTC Markets Group Welcomes Apex Critical Metals Corp. to OTCQX

Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

NEW YORK, Aug. 01, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — OTC Markets Group Inc. (OTCQX: OTCM), operator of regulated markets for trading 12,000 U.S. and international securities, today announced Apex Critical Metals Corp. (CSE: APXC; OTCQX: APXCF), a Canadian exploration company, has qualified to trade on the OTCQX® Best Market. Apex Critical Metals Corp. upgraded to OTCQX from the OTCQB® Venture Market.

Apex Critical Metals Corp. begins trading today on OTCQX under the symbol “APXCF.” U.S. investors can find current financial disclosure and Real-Time Level 2 quotes for the company on www.otcmarkets.com.

The OTCQX Market is designed for established, investor-focused U.S. and international companies. To qualify for OTCQX, companies must meet high financial standards, follow best practice corporate governance, and demonstrate compliance with applicable securities laws. Graduating to the OTCQX Market from the OTCQB Market marks an important milestone for companies, enabling them to demonstrate their qualifications and build visibility among U.S. investors.

“Graduating to the OTCQX Market marks another important step forward in our mission to build a leading North American explorer focused on critical metals,” stated Sean Charland, CEO of Apex Critical Metals. “This upgrade reflects the financial strength of our company, our commitment to transparent disclosure, and our intention to engage a broader base of U.S. investors as we continue to advance our rare earth and niobium-focused projects.”

About Apex Critical Metals Corp.
Apex Critical Metals Corp. is a Canadian exploration company specializing in the acquisition and development of properties prospective for carbonatites and alkaline rocks with potential to host economic concentrations of rare earth elements (REE’s), niobium, gold and copper mineralization. Apex’s Cap property located 85 kilometres northeast of Prince George, B.C., spans 25 square kilometres and hosts a recently identified promising 1.8-kilometre niobium trend. The Company’s Bianco carbonatite project encompasses 3,735 hectares covering a large carbonatite complex within an area known for significant niobium mineralization in northwestern Ontario. The company’s Lac Le Moyne project covers 4,025 hectares located in Northeastern Quebec, and hosts underexplored carbonatite outcrops originally mapped by government geologists in the 1970’s. By acquiring a multitude of carbonatite projects, Apex Critical Metals intends to investigate potential high-value opportunities to meet the growing global demand of specialty metals across various industries. Apex Critical is publicly listed in Canada on the Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE) under the symbol APXC, in the United States on the OTCQX market under the symbol APXCF, and in Germany on the Borse Frankfurt under the symbol KL9 and/or WKN: A40CCQ. Find out more at www.apexcriticalmetals.com where you can subscribe for News Alerts, watch our Video, or follow us on Facebook, X.com or LinkedIn.

About OTC Markets Group Inc.
OTC Markets Group Inc. (OTCQX: OTCM) operates regulated markets for trading 12,000 U.S. and international securities. Our data-driven disclosure standards form the foundation of our public markets: OTCQX® Best Market, OTCQB® Venture Market, OTCID™ Basic Market and Pink Limited™ Market. Our OTC Link® Alternative Trading Systems (ATSs) provide critical market infrastructure that broker-dealers rely on to facilitate trading. Our innovative model offers companies more efficient access to the U.S. financial markets.

OTC Link ATS, OTC Link ECN, OTC Link NQB, and MOON ATS™ are each SEC regulated ATS, operated by OTC Link LLC, a FINRA and SEC registered broker-dealer, member SIPC. To learn more about how we create better informed and more efficient markets, visit www.otcmarkets.com.

Media Contact:
OTC Markets Group Inc., +1 (212) 896-4428, media@otcmarkets.com

The MIL Network –

August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI: HTX Hot Listings Weekly Recap (July 21 – 28): SOL Memes & ETH DeFi Drive Market Surge, New Assets on HTX Post Impressive Gains
Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

HTX Hot Listings Weekly Recap

PANAMA CITY, Aug. 01, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — HTX, a leading global crypto exchange, reported robust performance from newly listed assets during the week of July 21 to July 28. Amid ongoing regulatory discussions and evolving technological narratives across the global crypto landscape, HTX’s new listings saw notable growth, driven primarily by the Solana meme coin and Ethereum DeFi ecosystems. Several assets posted market-leading gains, delivering substantial wealth effects for users.

Solana Meme Mania: VINE and ANI Take the Spotlight

Solana’s meme coin segment stood out with the strongest performance. Known for their vibrant communities and low barriers to entry, meme coins are often highly volatile and driven by market sentiment. The recent surge reflected both Solana’s high-performance, low-cost infrastructure and investors’ growing appetite for fresh narratives.
- Vine Coin (VINE): Exploded with a 234% increase this week. Vine, originally a-popular short video sharing platform launched in 2012, quickly amassed a massive user base before being shut down by its parent company, Twitter (now X), in 2017. However, on January 18, 2025, Elon Musk announced he was “considering” VINE’s return, leading to a significant rally for the meme coin launched by VINE’s CEO, @rus.
- Ani Grok Companion (ANI): Jumped 196%. This AI-focused token blends “gooning” memes with the Grok character, linked to xAI and Elon Musk, creating a unique blend of trending AI topics and playful community engagement.
- Pudgy Penguins (PENGU): Continued its strong momentum with a 38% increase. PENGU generates revenue through a wide array of toys and merchandise, now available at major retailers such as Walmart and Target. Notably, it’s the first crypto-native brand to break into these mass retail markets, highlighting its lasting market appeal and status as a stable representative within the Meme asset space.
BSC Ecosystem Flourishes: DONKEY and LISTA Rise

Outside the Solana Meme frenzy, the BNB Smart Chain (BSC) ecosystem also excelled with impressive performances.
- DONKEY: A rising star in the BSC Meme sector, recorded an astounding 164% gain. This highlights the BSC community’s ongoing enthusiasm for lighthearted, community-driven assets. The meme itself originated from CZ’s playful post, “I am a donkey”—a symbol of diligence in Chinese culture, representing those who work hard.
- Lista DAO (LISTA): A prominent BSC DeFi asset, rose by 83%. Lista DAO is a decentralized stablecoin lending protocol powered by LSDfi. It allows users to stake, liquid stake, and borrow lisUSD against various decentralized collateral. Lista aims to make lisUSD a leading stablecoin in the crypto space through innovative liquid staking solutions.
ETH DeFi and RWA Narratives Heat Up: SPK Shines

The Ethereum DeFi sector also had a strong week, with established blue-chip projects and emerging ventures rebounding. Additionally, investment interest in the Real World Assets (RWA) sector accelerated, driven by the rising trend of tokenizing traditional financial assets.
- Spark (SPK): Topped this ecosystem’s gainers, up 125%. Spark is an on-chain capital allocator that has deployed $3.86 billion across DeFi, CeFi, and RWA sectors. It significantly boosts capital efficiency by automatically and dynamically adjusting asset allocation based on market conditions, all while maintaining a cautious risk profile.
- RESOLV surged 37%, Maple Finance (SYRUP) rose 33%, and Convex Finance (CVX) gained 32%, all posting notable increases. Established projects like CVX benefited from the anticipated restructuring of the Curve ecosystem, while newer assets such as SYRUP and RESOLV saw momentum driven by changes to liquidity mining and incentive mechanisms.
- Ethena (ENA), an RWA project, climbed 34%. Ethena is a synthetic dollar protocol built on Ethereum, designed to offer a crypto-native currency solution that operates independently of traditional banking system infrastructure.
HTX Hot Token Listing Winners

New Asset Performance Underscores Platform’s Wealth-Generating Potential

Overall, wealth generation on HTX remain pronounced this week, driven by hot narratives and multi-ecosystem synergy. Ten assets on HTX surged by over 30%, with five exceeding 50% gains. The combined momentum from hot SOL Meme assets and the resurgence of the ETH DeFi ecosystem undeniably reinforced HTX’s reputation for generating significant wealth for its users.

As the global crypto market narratives continue to evolve, Meme culture, DeFi innovation, and RWA applications will remain crucial growth engines to watch. Looking ahead, HTX is committed to continually deepening its industry-leading foresight, empowering users to participate in popular sectors at the earliest opportunity and capitalize on industry dividends. HTX will stand by its global users, helping them navigate market fluctuations and uncover new opportunities in every cycle.

About HTX

Founded in 2013, HTX（formerly Huobi）has evolved from a virtual asset exchange into a comprehensive ecosystem of blockchain businesses that span digital asset trading, financial derivatives, research, investments, incubation, and other businesses.

As a world-leading gateway to Web3, HTX harbors global capabilities that enable it to provide users with safe and reliable services. Adhering to the growth strategy of “Global Expansion, Thriving Ecosystem, Wealth Effect, Security & Compliance,” HTX is dedicated to providing quality services and values to virtual asset enthusiasts worldwide.

To learn more about HTX, please visit https://www.htx.com/ or HTX Square, and follow HTX on X, Telegram, and Discord. For further inquiries, please contact glo-media@htx-inc.com.

Disclaimer: This content is provided by HTX. The statements, views, and opinions expressed in this content are solely those of the content provider and do not necessarily reflect the views of this media platform or its publisher. We do not endorse, verify, or guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of any information presented. We do not guarantee any claims, statements, or promises made in this article. This content is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial, investment, or trading advice. Investing in crypto and mining-related opportunities involves significant risks, including the potential loss of capital. It is possible to lose all your capital. These products may not be suitable for everyone, and you should ensure that you understand the risks involved. Seek independent advice if necessary. Speculate only with funds that you can afford to lose. Readers are strongly encouraged to conduct their own research and consult with a qualified financial advisor before making any investment decisions. However, due to the inherently speculative nature of the blockchain sector—including cryptocurrency, NFTs, and mining—complete accuracy cannot always be guaranteed. Neither the media platform nor the publisher shall be held responsible for any fraudulent activities, misrepresentations, or financial losses arising from the content of this press release. In the event of any legal claims or charges against this article, we accept no liability or responsibility. Globenewswire does not endorse any content on this page.

Legal Disclaimer: This media platform provides the content of this article on an “as-is” basis, without any warranties or representations of any kind, express or implied. We assume no responsibility for any inaccuracies, errors, or omissions. We do not assume any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information presented herein. Any concerns, complaints, or copyright issues related to this article should be directed to the content provider mentioned above.

Photos accompanying this announcement are available at:

https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/53598de3-a556-4050-b5e9-5e55e765674e

https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/b011ab4d-49de-4c9e-9a63-f40d562611e4

The MIL Network –
August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI: Bitget Surges to 7.2% Global Derivatives Market Share, Ranks Top 3 Highlights Bitcoin.com Report

Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

VICTORIA, Seychelles, Aug. 01, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Bitget, the leading cryptocurrency exchange and Web3 company, today co-releases with Bitcoin.com an educational flagship titled “Crypto Derivatives 101 – Market Breakdown: Who’s Winning the Race?” designed to help newcomers navigate the fast-growing derivatives market, the guide also highlights Bitget’s leadership as its market share doubles to 7.2% in 2025, up from 4.6% year‑to‑date.

As detailed in the newly released report, Bitget has emerged as the third-largest derivatives exchange globally by trading volume. In April 2025 alone, the platform processed $92 billion in futures volume. Bitget’s market share rose from 4.6% at the beginning of the year to 7.2%, placing it just behind Binance and OKX. While Binance continues to lead with a 38% share, Bitget’s rapid ascent reflects both strong retail engagement and increasing institutional preference, particularly for ETH-based derivatives, where Bitget has surpassed Binance in liquidity within key trading ranges.

“We believe educational access is foundational,” said Gracy Chen, CEO at Bitget. “Crypto derivatives have often been misunderstood or seen as overly complex, especially by new users. With this guide, we aim to change that. We want to make sure that both retail and institutional users feel empowered to understand, navigate, and leverage the powerful tools available to them. Bitget is proud to be leading this industry with a user-first approach, backed by AI-powered tools, liquidity innovations, and a commitment to transparency and accessibility.”

The Crypto Derivatives 101 report serves as a practical, beginner-friendly guide to understanding how derivatives work and why they matter in today’s markets. It breaks down core instruments such as futures, options, and perpetual swaps, while explaining how these tools are used for hedging, speculation, and arbitrage.

A standout feature of the report is a comprehensive comparison of centralized (CEX) and decentralized (DEX) perpetual markets, weighing factors like liquidity, slippage, fees, execution speed, and custody. Bitget, Binance, and OKX are shown to lead in areas like liquidity depth and institutional readiness, while platforms like GMX and Hyperliquid offer unmatched transparency and self-custody for DeFi-native users.

The report also includes real-world trading scenarios that help readers understand which platform type is better suited to their goals. For example, a retail trader managing small-cap positions may benefit from Bitget’s intuitive UI, low fees, and fiat on-ramps. In contrast, DeFi-native users seeking anonymity and composability may prefer permissionless DEXs. Institutions executing large block trades are shown to favor CEXs like Bitget for better capital efficiency, risk management tools, and regulatory compliance. These case studies ground the content in real-world decision-making and make the guide actionable for new users.

“The crypto industry has come a long way in terms of legitimacy, but education remains a key barrier,” said Eli Bordun, Partnership Director of Bitcoin.com. “This report breaks down step-by-step how the modern crypto markets function. Derivatives are often seen as tools for professionals — but they’re increasingly relevant for everyday users, DAOs, and even traditional financial players exploring the space. By working with Bitget to produce this report, we aim to demystify these instruments and support safe, informed participation in the market.”

The report also highlights emerging trends set to shape the next era of crypto derivatives. One key theme is the rise of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), which are increasingly being integrated into derivatives products and yield strategies. Another is the expansion of AI-powered trading platforms, which are revolutionizing how both retail and institutional users manage portfolios, select strategies, and mitigate risk. Regulatory clarity is also improving, with frameworks like the EU’s MiCA and Singapore’s MAS paving the way for responsible innovation.

Finally, the report explores the evolution of CeDeFi (Centralized-Decentralized Finance) models, where platforms like Bitget offer the best of both worlds: secure custody and intuitive UX alongside permissionless asset access and DeFi integration.

With this report, Bitget and Bitcoin.com reaffirm their shared commitment to building a more inclusive crypto trading environment. As derivatives become increasingly central to digital finance, Bitget is positioned not only as a market leader — but as a bridge between the next generation of users and the tools that will define their financial future.

For more information, please see the full report here.

About Bitget

Established in 2018, Bitget is the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange and Web3 company. Serving over 120 million users in 150+ countries and regions, the Bitget exchange is committed to helping users trade smarter with its pioneering copy trading feature and other trading solutions, while offering real-time access to Bitcoin price, Ethereum price, and other cryptocurrency prices. Formerly known as BitKeep, Bitget Wallet is a leading non-custodial crypto wallet supporting 130+ blockchains and millions of tokens. It offers multi-chain trading, staking, payments, and direct access to 20,000+ DApps, with advanced swaps and market insights built into a single platform.
Bitget is driving crypto adoption through strategic partnerships, such as its role as the Official Crypto Partner of the World’s Top Football League, LALIGA, in EASTERN, SEA and LATAM markets, as well as a global partner of Turkish National athletes Buse Tosun Çavuşoğlu (Wrestling world champion), Samet Gümüş (Boxing gold medalist) and İlkin Aydın (Volleyball national team), to inspire the global community to embrace the future of cryptocurrency.

Aligned with its global impact strategy, Bitget has joined hands with UNICEF to support blockchain education for 1.1 million people by 2027. In the world of motorsports, Bitget is the exclusive cryptocurrency exchange partner of MotoGP™, one of the world’s most thrilling championships.

For more information, visit: Website | Twitter | Telegram | LinkedIn | Discord | Bitget Wallet
For media inquiries, please contact: media@bitget.com

Risk Warning: Digital asset prices are subject to fluctuation and may experience significant volatility. Investors are advised to only allocate funds they can afford to lose. The value of any investment may be impacted, and there is a possibility that financial objectives may not be met, nor the principal investment recovered. Independent financial advice should always be sought, and personal financial experience and standing carefully considered. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. Bitget accepts no liability for any potential losses incurred. Nothing contained herein should be construed as financial advice. For further information, please refer to our Terms of Use.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/6595d449-33e8-478f-a5d3-67dc9f840558

The MIL Network –

August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI: Bitget Surges to 7.2% Global Derivatives Market Share, Ranks Top 3 Highlights Bitcoin.com Report

Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

VICTORIA, Seychelles, Aug. 01, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Bitget, the leading cryptocurrency exchange and Web3 company, today co-releases with Bitcoin.com an educational flagship titled “Crypto Derivatives 101 – Market Breakdown: Who’s Winning the Race?” designed to help newcomers navigate the fast-growing derivatives market, the guide also highlights Bitget’s leadership as its market share doubles to 7.2% in 2025, up from 4.6% year‑to‑date.

As detailed in the newly released report, Bitget has emerged as the third-largest derivatives exchange globally by trading volume. In April 2025 alone, the platform processed $92 billion in futures volume. Bitget’s market share rose from 4.6% at the beginning of the year to 7.2%, placing it just behind Binance and OKX. While Binance continues to lead with a 38% share, Bitget’s rapid ascent reflects both strong retail engagement and increasing institutional preference, particularly for ETH-based derivatives, where Bitget has surpassed Binance in liquidity within key trading ranges.

“We believe educational access is foundational,” said Gracy Chen, CEO at Bitget. “Crypto derivatives have often been misunderstood or seen as overly complex, especially by new users. With this guide, we aim to change that. We want to make sure that both retail and institutional users feel empowered to understand, navigate, and leverage the powerful tools available to them. Bitget is proud to be leading this industry with a user-first approach, backed by AI-powered tools, liquidity innovations, and a commitment to transparency and accessibility.”

The Crypto Derivatives 101 report serves as a practical, beginner-friendly guide to understanding how derivatives work and why they matter in today’s markets. It breaks down core instruments such as futures, options, and perpetual swaps, while explaining how these tools are used for hedging, speculation, and arbitrage.

A standout feature of the report is a comprehensive comparison of centralized (CEX) and decentralized (DEX) perpetual markets, weighing factors like liquidity, slippage, fees, execution speed, and custody. Bitget, Binance, and OKX are shown to lead in areas like liquidity depth and institutional readiness, while platforms like GMX and Hyperliquid offer unmatched transparency and self-custody for DeFi-native users.

The report also includes real-world trading scenarios that help readers understand which platform type is better suited to their goals. For example, a retail trader managing small-cap positions may benefit from Bitget’s intuitive UI, low fees, and fiat on-ramps. In contrast, DeFi-native users seeking anonymity and composability may prefer permissionless DEXs. Institutions executing large block trades are shown to favor CEXs like Bitget for better capital efficiency, risk management tools, and regulatory compliance. These case studies ground the content in real-world decision-making and make the guide actionable for new users.

“The crypto industry has come a long way in terms of legitimacy, but education remains a key barrier,” said Eli Bordun, Partnership Director of Bitcoin.com. “This report breaks down step-by-step how the modern crypto markets function. Derivatives are often seen as tools for professionals — but they’re increasingly relevant for everyday users, DAOs, and even traditional financial players exploring the space. By working with Bitget to produce this report, we aim to demystify these instruments and support safe, informed participation in the market.”

The report also highlights emerging trends set to shape the next era of crypto derivatives. One key theme is the rise of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), which are increasingly being integrated into derivatives products and yield strategies. Another is the expansion of AI-powered trading platforms, which are revolutionizing how both retail and institutional users manage portfolios, select strategies, and mitigate risk. Regulatory clarity is also improving, with frameworks like the EU’s MiCA and Singapore’s MAS paving the way for responsible innovation.

Finally, the report explores the evolution of CeDeFi (Centralized-Decentralized Finance) models, where platforms like Bitget offer the best of both worlds: secure custody and intuitive UX alongside permissionless asset access and DeFi integration.

With this report, Bitget and Bitcoin.com reaffirm their shared commitment to building a more inclusive crypto trading environment. As derivatives become increasingly central to digital finance, Bitget is positioned not only as a market leader — but as a bridge between the next generation of users and the tools that will define their financial future.

For more information, please see the full report here.

About Bitget

Established in 2018, Bitget is the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange and Web3 company. Serving over 120 million users in 150+ countries and regions, the Bitget exchange is committed to helping users trade smarter with its pioneering copy trading feature and other trading solutions, while offering real-time access to Bitcoin price, Ethereum price, and other cryptocurrency prices. Formerly known as BitKeep, Bitget Wallet is a leading non-custodial crypto wallet supporting 130+ blockchains and millions of tokens. It offers multi-chain trading, staking, payments, and direct access to 20,000+ DApps, with advanced swaps and market insights built into a single platform.
Bitget is driving crypto adoption through strategic partnerships, such as its role as the Official Crypto Partner of the World’s Top Football League, LALIGA, in EASTERN, SEA and LATAM markets, as well as a global partner of Turkish National athletes Buse Tosun Çavuşoğlu (Wrestling world champion), Samet Gümüş (Boxing gold medalist) and İlkin Aydın (Volleyball national team), to inspire the global community to embrace the future of cryptocurrency.

Aligned with its global impact strategy, Bitget has joined hands with UNICEF to support blockchain education for 1.1 million people by 2027. In the world of motorsports, Bitget is the exclusive cryptocurrency exchange partner of MotoGP™, one of the world’s most thrilling championships.

For more information, visit: Website | Twitter | Telegram | LinkedIn | Discord | Bitget Wallet
For media inquiries, please contact: media@bitget.com

Risk Warning: Digital asset prices are subject to fluctuation and may experience significant volatility. Investors are advised to only allocate funds they can afford to lose. The value of any investment may be impacted, and there is a possibility that financial objectives may not be met, nor the principal investment recovered. Independent financial advice should always be sought, and personal financial experience and standing carefully considered. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. Bitget accepts no liability for any potential losses incurred. Nothing contained herein should be construed as financial advice. For further information, please refer to our Terms of Use.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/6595d449-33e8-478f-a5d3-67dc9f840558

The MIL Network –

August 5, 2025
MIL-OSI: ETH Contract Participation Model for 2025 Announced by HashJ to Tap Market Opportunities
Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

London, United Kingdom, Aug. 01, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — MGPD Finance Limited, doing business as HashJ, today announced the introduction of its updated ETH contract participation model, developed to support broader engagement in Ethereum-linked income opportunities. This move comes as Ethereum (ETH) continues to hold its place as a foundational asset within the Web3 ecosystem, even as its mainnet fully transitions from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) following the 2022 “Merge.”

Despite this shift, ETH-related contract activity remains strong across derivative networks and GPU-compatible platforms. HashJ’s 2025 model aims to simplify access to these evolving opportunities for individual users by lowering technical barriers and offering transparent participation structures.

Ethereum Market Weekly Overview: Layer-2 Networks and On-Chain Activity Gain Ground

During the fourth week of July 2025, ETH held steady around $3,790, while on-chain activity remained robust. Metrics such as active wallet addresses and decentralized application (DApp) usage saw steady growth. According to data from L2Beat, the total value locked (TVL) in Layer-2 networks like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base reached new peaks, reinforcing Ethereum’s position as a leader in blockchain fee revenue.
In parallel, Ethereum continues to attract diverse projects, including artificial intelligence (AI) protocols, decentralized proof-of-stake (DPoS) systems, and tokenized real-world asset (RWA) platforms—further cementing its status as the dominant smart contract infrastructure.

Current Landscape of ETH-Related Contracts

Although Ethereum’s mainnet no longer supports traditional PoW-based contracts, derivative chains such as EthereumPoW (ETHW), Ethereum Classic (ETC), and other EVM-compatible PoW ecosystems continue to offer contract-based participation. These networks maintain close market correlation with ETH, creating an alternate avenue for users to engage in ETH-linked strategies.
Key approaches include:
- Participating in contracts tied to ETHW or ETC and later converting proceeds into ETH;
- Utilizing platforms such as HashJ to access GPU resources and schedule contract-based operations across ETH-aligned networks;
- Diversifying income strategies via ETH staking, DeFi protocols, and eligible airdrop campaigns.
HashJ’s New Model: Accessible Participation in ETH-Linked Contracts

HashJ’s latest platform features are focused on enhancing user participation in ETH-related rewards with low entry barriers and simplified processes. This includes:
- Access to GPU resource scheduling and allocation across ETH-relevant derivative ecosystems;
- Intelligent task distribution to support optimized contract outcomes;
- Transparent performance monitoring via a mobile application and user dashboard;
- Automated revenue settlement with unrestricted asset withdrawals.
New users can access a welcome package valued at $118, comprising $100 in contract trial credits and $18 in platform cash. No specialized hardware or infrastructure setup is required, and users can manage their participation via visual interfaces designed for ease of use.

Continued Relevance of ETH-Linked Contracts

Despite the discontinuation of PoW contracts on the Ethereum mainnet, ETH continues to command broad investor interest. ETH-based contracts and derivative tokens present various benefits:
- Closely mirrored price movements from tokens like ETHW and ETC allow for ETH-aligned exposure;
- Flexible use of contracts as a means to hedge risk or manage portfolio allocation;
- Simplified entry via platforms like HashJ reduces reliance on traditional hardware setups or data center integration.
For everyday users, these tools offer a practical and efficient alternative to more complex technical methods of participating in ETH-related returns.

Conclusion

As Ethereum maintains its leading role in decentralized infrastructure, new models of participation are emerging to reflect evolving network dynamics. HashJ’s ETH contract access framework presents a simplified and scalable method for engaging with ETH-linked opportunities.

For those looking to participate in Ethereum’s evolving contract landscape without encountering technical or operational hurdles, HashJ’s model offers a structured and user-friendly entry point. New users receive a $118 gift package upon registration (including $100 contract trial credit and $18 cash).

About MGPD Finance Limited (HashJ)

MGPD Finance Limited, doing business as HashJ, is a fintech company based in the United Kingdom. Founded in 2018, the company provides contract-based digital reward systems for BTC, ETH, DOGE, and XRP, with over 2 million users across more than 90 countries.

For more information, visit: www.hashj.com
App Download: Available on iOS and Android
Business Inquiries: pr@hashj.com

The MIL Network –
August 5, 2025

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