Indian opposition blasts Modi’s response to US killing of sailors
Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi. Image: Times of India
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is taking heat from his political opponents for his response to the deaths of three ship workers who were killed in the Gulf of Oman last week by US forces as part of President Donald Trump’s illegal war with Iran.
Fury in India has only grown over the past few days as the US has refused to apologize for the deaths of the three men, who were killed by missile strikes as they were working aboard commercial oil tankers.
Rahul Gandhi, leader of the opposition National Congress Party, took to social media on Sunday to blast Modi, leader of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, for remaining “silent” over the killing of the sailors by the US.
“Just days after the murder of three Indian sailors in American attacks—no remorse, no apology,” wrote Gandhi, who accused Modi and his allies of behaving “like an obedient servant” by not confronting the Trump administration over the incident.
Indian politician Arvind Kejriwal, who previously served as the chief minister of Delhi, vowed that Trump “will be held accountable for the Indian lives lost,” going so far as to call the US president “a cowardly, cold-blooded murderer.”
“It is unfortunate that PM Modi remains silent,” Kejriwal added, “but soon, India will have a strong prime minister who will make you pay for your misdeeds.”
Member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor took aim at US Secretary of State Marco Rubio for emphasizing, in the wake of the killings, that all ships operating around the Strait of Hormuz “should immediately comply with orders from US forces” or else risk becoming targets.
“Deeply shocking to read this official US statement, which contains absolutely no expression of regret or condolence for the loss of innocent Indian lives,” wrote Tharoor. “How can a ‘friend’ and strategic partner be so deeply insensitive?”
Tharoor added that “practically every merchant ship navigating these crucial waters has Indian crew on board,” and asked whether they are “all considered fair fame for US missiles now?”
The US Central Command claimed last week that the ship where the three slain Indian crew members worked “repeatedly refused to comply with directions from American forces,” after which US aircraft “fired precision munitions into the ship’s engine room.”
President Trump Calls FT Report on $300 Billion Iran Reconstruction Fund ‘Fake News’
President Donald Trump rejected a Financial Times report that the Trump administration was supporting a plan to invest $300 billion in Iran’s reconstruction, insisting the claim was “fake news” while reiterating that Tehran had agreed not to obtain a nuclear weapon.
A proposed reconstruction fund worth $300 billion could be established if Iran accepts the terms outlined in a memorandum of understanding aimed at ending the conflict and reaching a nuclear agreement, The Financial Times reported.
The fund would be financed primarily by private investors and international partners rather than directly by the US government, but would be backed by the Trump administration.
President Trump responded on social media by dismissing the report as “fake news” and blaming what he called “Dumocrats,” a term apparently directed at Democrats.
“Iran has agreed to never have a Nuclear Weapon! Also, the story that the U.S. is paying Iran 300 million Dollars is Fake News, put out by the Dumocrats!!!” he wrote.
His post referred to “300 million Dollars,” while the Financial Times article cited a figure of $300 billion. The report also did not state that the funding would come directly from the US government, instead describing a structure backed by private investors and international partners.
The exchange came shortly after Trump announced that the United States and Iran had reached an agreement to end the conflict.
Following that announcement, Trump traveled to the G-7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, France, where he expressed confidence in the agreement and said additional negotiations would follow.
“We have our deal done with Iran, and it should be successful, it goes to a second stage, which I think would be actually easier,” Trump told reporters at a G7 summit.
He described the agreement as “a wall to a nuclear weapon” for Iran.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shebaz Sharif said the proposal is expected to move to a formal signing ceremony on Friday in Geneva.
A potential agreement between the US and Iran could be seen as a “betrayal” in Israel, a former Israeli prime minister told Irish public broadcaster RTE, Anadolu reports.
“I think that maybe from the point of view of the original position of Netanyahu, it may be interpreted as a betrayal,” Ehud Olmert said, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
He said Netanyahu would be unlikely to say so publicly because he is “entirely, completely dependent on the relations and support” of US President Donald Trump.
Though the details of the agreement were not yet fully known, Olmert argued that there appeared to be “a big margin” between the initial expectations of the US and Israel when military operations began and the current understanding between Washington and Tehran.
READ: Trump says Israel’s Netanyahu must be ‘more responsible’ on Lebanon
Olmert said he believed “the door is open” to an agreement between Israel and Lebanon, adding that Israel should withdraw from southern Lebanon as part of negotiations with the Lebanese government.
“We don’t need any territory in the south of Lebanon… we should pull out completely from the south of Lebanon and make all the necessary adjustments for territorial agreement, and we should try to make peace,” he added.
He said expectations that the Iranian regime would collapse were unrealistic, arguing that Tehran had endured significant challenges over decades and that such assumptions were “not serious.”
Both the US and Iran appeared to be seeking “a reasonable way to restore the situation to what it was before the war started,” he added.
“And the Iranians were very successful,” Olmert said.
READ: Ben Gvir attacks Trump-Iran deal: Israel ‘not bound by US agreement’
Mobileye is entering the US robotaxi market with standalone service
The driving technology company Mobileye plans to launch a robotaxi service in an as-yet-unnamed US city in 2027, it said earlier today. The service will be vertically integrated, using Mobileye’s Moovit mobility platform to interact with customers booking rides, coordinate drivers, and so on. The Israeli company, which was bought by Intel in 2017 before going public again in 2022, says it will start with around 100 robotaxis early next year.
“Mobileye has spent more than two decades building the technologies required for autonomous driving,” said Prof. Amnon Shashua, founder and CEO of Mobileye. “Today we are taking the next step: combining those technologies with operational ownership to create a financially and geographically scalable robotaxi business designed from the ground up for global deployment,”
The company first rose to prominence in the mid-2010s, when Tesla began using Mobileye’s advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) as part of Autopilot. That relationship lasted until 2016, when Mobileye dropped Tesla as a customer after being alarmed that a driver assistance system was being sold to end users as driverless technology. Since then, Mobileye has continued to work with other partners on ADAS and autonomous vehicles.
It has developed a new “SuperVision” ADAS that combines cameras and radar sensors, used by Porsche and Polestar, among others. On the robotaxi front, it has partnered with Volkswagen Group’s MOIA to develop a commercially available robotaxi based on the VW ID. Buzz minivan, and last year, Mobileye revealed plans to work with Lyft to deploy robotaxis in Dallas, “as soon as” this year.
“This initiative is not a replacement for our existing partnerships; it is an extension of them,” said Shashua. “We remain deeply committed to enabling automakers and mobility providers with Mobileye Drive. At the same time, operating our own service allows us to accelerate adoption, gain direct operational experience, and showcase the full potential of autonomous mobility,” he said.
If Mobileye’s experience with the initial 100 robotaxis goes well, it says it will scale up to around 17,000 robotaxis within the following five years. “The robotaxi revolution has only just begun, and its potential for transforming how we travel around the world continues to increase,” he said.
Elderly Woman on Mobility Scooter Runs into Bike Race Causing Pileup (Video)
A junior cycling race in Germany turned into absolute chaos when an elderly woman on a mobility scooter rolled into the road and sent riders flying in a shocking crash caught on video.
More than 100 young cyclists from across Europe were competing Sunday in the Saarland Trofeo Juniors when the bizarre moment unfolded along the countryside race route.
Video from stunned spectators shows the woman slowly inching her mobility scooter out from the crowd and into the path of the speeding cyclists.
An elderly woman caused a mass crash during a cycling race in Germany
The pensioner reportedly wanted to get a better look at the athletes, misjudged the situation, and rode directly onto the course. pic.twitter.com/oA27t7QhA1
One rider managed to swerve around her just in time. But the cyclist behind him was not so lucky.
Dutch rider Paul Vriesman slammed into the scooter, narrowly missing the woman herself, before flipping headfirst over his handlebars and crashing hard onto the road.
The frightening wreck triggered a chain reaction, with at least four other cyclists tumbling to the pavement as bikes and bodies scattered across the course.
Despite how brutal the crash looked, Vriesman later said he escaped the wreck without serious injuries.
He described it on social media as “a very nasty looking crash” and said he “got away with it relatively well.”
Still, the young cyclist said he was stunned that something like this could happen during a race.
“Lost for words on how something like this can happen,” Vriesman wrote, calling it another painful setback after already being involved in a scary crash earlier in the season.
“So much hard work and yet another setback,” he added.
Amazingly, none of the riders involved in the scooter pileup suffered serious injuries, according to reports.
The crash quickly went viral and sparked outrage among cycling fans, with many warning spectators to stay far away from the race path.
Cycling commentator Los Brolin, who shared the video, said even the smallest movement into the road can have disastrous consequences when riders are racing at high speeds.
“Even a small step onto the road can have serious consequences at these speeds,” he wrote.
He also claimed this was not the first spectator-related incident during the race.
“Junior racing is already dangerous enough without spectators making it even more dangerous,” he added.
The race continued after the crash, with Norway’s Sindre Orholm-Lønseth taking first place. Splinter van’t Hoff of the Netherlands finished second, while Germany’s Elias Wändel came in third.
The bizarre scooter incident brought back memories of the infamous 2021 Tour de France crash, when a woman holding a cardboard sign stepped too close to the riders and caused a massive pileup.
In that crash, German cyclist Tony Martin clipped the sign, sparking a domino effect that sent racers crashing across the road.
The woman fled the scene before later turning herself in to police. Tour de France organizers eventually decided not to press charges.
This time, the frightening scene ended with a miracle: bruised riders, wrecked bikes, and a viral reminder that spectators should never get too close to the action.
In 2022, French forces departed Mali as insurgents made incursions into the capital, Bamako. A United Nations peacekeeping mission also left, with the security void filled by Russian forces. Burkina Fasoand Chad followed suit, ordering French troops out in 2023 and 2025, respectively.
But Niger presents a different scenario. While the junta that came to power there in 2023 has expelled many Western forces from its borders, there is one exception: a contingent of about 350 Italian troops.
Between 2020 and 2023, six countries in the Sahel saw civilian governments replaced with military leaders. Many of these coupists capitalized on public discontent over deteriorating economies and security conditions to overthrow their predecessors.
From around 2013, Sahelian countries, including Mali and Niger, allowed military personnel from the United States, France and other Western countries to assist in efforts to counter jihadist and separatist movements throughout the region.
Despite the initial welcome for such interventions, local populations largely came to view these troops as ineffective vestiges of the colonial era. As such, they welcomed the anti-Western rhetoric of coup plotters.
Yet the military men who took over faced the same instability that undermined the governments they replaced. To compensate for the lack of Western military support, many governments in the region turned to Russia’s Wagner Group, now named the “Africa Corps,” for security needs.
Best known for its presence in Mali, the military group now controlled by the Russian Ministry of Defense has seemingly shifted tactics. Gone are brutal attacks against extremist groups and civilians alike, replaced by a more conservative, defense-focused strategy that some have argued places a greater burden on African forces.
Such developments have led NATO countries to worry about their dwindling influence amid growing instability along the security bloc’s southern flank – an area that comprises the Middle East and North Africa region, as well as the Sahel. The security situation has also spurred internal displacement and external migration.
For civilians throughout the Sahel, the implications of the dangerous status quo are alarming. Since 2020, the area has accounted for the world’s largest increase in the number of fatalities linked to militant Islamic groups.
Niger, which houses the world’s eighth-largest reserves of uranium, is not immune to this surge of violence. On Jan. 29, 2026, the Islamic State Sahel Province took credit for an attack against the Diori Hamani civilian airport of Niamey, as well as the adjacent military airbase. Although no civilian or military deaths were reported, the attack signaled a potential shift in IS-Sahel’s strategy in Niger and an emboldened strategy of attacking larger cities and infrastructure.
While the Russian foreign ministry claimed joint responsibility for neutralizing the attack along with the Nigerien armed forces, a contingent of Italian forces and its gendarmerie, known as the Carabinieri, were also present.
A satellite image shows security roadblocks and vehicle checkpoints near the entrance to Niger’s Niamey airport following an attack in January 2026.Satellite image (c) 2026 Vantor/Getty Images
Since the withdrawal of all other Western and U.N. groups, the Italians, including the Carabinieri, have become the only Western force still in Niger.
Gendarmeries like the Carabinieri operate differently from conventional army forces. They mix military force with policing functions – a setup unfamiliar to countries such as the U.S. and the U.K. that tend to keep these roles separate.
Such a combination of mandates makes them ideal for certain tasks, such as training domestic military forces and quelling unrest in acute situations.
The Carabinieri also have experience investigating complex crimes – a skill developed over years as the special forces in high-profile mafia cases. This is particularly useful in the Sahel, as the tactics of jihadist groups progressively resemble those of organized criminal networks.
Over the years, Italy’s Carabinieri have been invited by foreign governments emerging from armed conflict or fighting low-intensity conflicts to train local forces and help maintain order. Afghanistan, Kosovo and the Palestinian Authority have all turned to the Carabinieri as an effective and efficient alternative to traditional peacekeeping forces.
In the case of Niger, such an invitation reportedly arrived in Italy around December 2016, when the then-government requested a contingent of 470 Italian military personnel, including the Carabinieri. The plan was to reinforce control over Nigerien territory, thereby stabilizing one of the main transit countries for migrants attempting to reach the Italian and European coasts.
Notably, this invitation was extended even after the change of government in Niger in 2021.
Carabinieri as a model
In 2023, when the Nigerien government forced the military, economic, and even media presences of France, the U.N. and the U.S. from the country, the Italians were permitted to stay.
The reasons, I believe, are threefold.
The first relates to the fact that Italy lacks the same reputation as a colonizing power that France – and also the U.S. – maintains among many governments and populations of the Global South.
Italy has a colonial past, of course, and its government forces committed atrocities in areas under Italian dominion in East Africa between the 1880s and 1941.
But as a result of its defeat in World War II, Italy was forced out of its overseas territories earlier than some of its European peers. Having avoided the subsequent turbulent decolonization movements experienced by, say, France, Great Britain or Belgium throughout the 1950s and ’60s, Italy has largely been able to avoid postcolonial animosity, enabling it to maintain ambiguous ties with African and Arab states.
The second reason for the Italians’ continued presence in Niger rests on ongoing diplomatic relations and strategically timed comments from the Italian government that have reassured current Nigerien authorities. Following the 2023 coup d’état, Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani called for a return to democracy, in line with other international voices. But he refused the idea of a Western-imposed military intervention even before one had been formally proposed.
Finally, the targeted, highly specialized nature of Italian operations has made them useful for Nigerien forces. The Italians’ willingness and ability to cooperate with local authorities – along with the relatively large footprint that a small number of troops can leave – have left the Italians, and the Carabinieri more specifically, with a reputation for effectiveness. Moreover, their reduced size relative to the much larger U.S. and French operations has dampened any opposition from locals.
While the security void of departing Western forces has been partially filled by other actors, notably the Russian Africa Corps, the increased instability across neighboring countries has shown these forces’ limits. In that environment, this small contingent of Italian forces may well make Italy the only actor in a position to negotiate for Western interests in the area.
Is China sleepwalking down Japan’s zombie economy path?
The photo above is not from China; it’s from Japan.
In the 1970s, Daiei was Japan’s top retailer. But after Japan’s asset bubble burst around 1990, it became Japan’s most famous “zombie” company — staggering along unprofitably, kept afloat by a constant stream of below-market-rate loans from UFJ Bank and other big Japanese banks. Eventually the company was acquired by Aeon, a more successful retailer, and its once-storied brand is slated to be retired for good in the next few years.
I tend to be very skeptical of comparisons between post-1990 Japan and post-2021 China, because there are just so many differences between the two economies (and between the global economic environments at the time).
Their industrial policies are different, their trading relationships are different, their bubbles and busts happened for very different reasons and so on. But in the case of “zombie” companies, there may be some important parallels.
What’s important about Daiei is not how it failed, but why it didn’t fail much sooner. Caballero, Hoshi, and Kashyap wrote a paper in 2008 arguing that “zombie” companies like Daiei held the Japanese economy back during the 1990s (and, in some cases, even beyond the 1990s).
The basic story is that after 1990, the Japanese economy slowed down, and lots of companies that used to be profitable — especially in the construction, retail,and trading sectors — were no longer profitable. These companies owed a lot of money to banks.
If they stopped being able to pay back their loans, the banks would be forced to recognize bad debt on their books. This would get them in trouble with regulators (because of capital requirements), and it would also get them in trouble with the Japanese public.
So what the banks did was to lend even more money to the failing companies that already owed them a lot of money, at very cheap interest rates. The new loans were used to pay back the old loans, and the new loans would be classified on the bank’s books as “good” debt. This process — known as “evergreening” — kept banks from ever having to acknowledge their losses:
Evergreening kept a bunch of companies afloat — like Daiei — that had utterly broken business models. Theoretically, the companies could have eventually pivoted their business models and recovered, or Japan’s economy could have started booming again, etc. In practice, this never happened.
Caballero, Hoshi and Kashyap argue that evergreening was very bad for the Japanese economy, because it hoovered up scarce resources that better companies could have used to grow. With all of those crappy loans clogging up their books, Japanese banks couldn’t lend to healthier companies.
With big zombies like Daiei still able to employ large amounts of Japan’s best managers, young scrappy upstarts were deprived of talent. The authors argue that keeping all of this labor and capital locked up inside doomed companies contributed significantly to Japan’s long productivity stagnation.
Why did the Japanese government allow this to happen? Preserving employment at the zombie companies was probably a big part of it. Japan had a strong tradition of job security at that point in time, and to throw so many people out of work — even if they could have gotten new jobs eventually — would have been seen as cruel and unfair.
Social unrest was a possibility. Bank bailouts may also have been deeply politically unpopular. In any case, whatever the reason, throughout the 1990s the government supported banks with various capital injections and regulatory forbearance, without forcing banks to cut off the zombies.
Anyway, that’s Japan. The question is whether something like this will happen in China.
China’s experience with its real estate bubble and bust doesn’t exactly parallel Japan’s, but there are some broad similarities. Since 2021, there has been a broad economic slowdown (probably more severe than the official numbers suggest), and a long-lasting chill in real-estate-related industries. This has predictably led to a rise in the number of loss-making companies:
You’ll notice on this chart that the share of non-performing loans has actually gone down since 2021, even as fewer companies are turning a profit. That suggests that lots of Chinese companies are being kept on life support by cheap bank loans. Here’s the Rhodium Group:
Some concrete data points suggest that China’s evergreening of debt is more widespread than is commonly the case in most market economies. The ratio of banks’ reported non-performing loans has decreased over the past years, while the share of loss-making enterprises increased…This would indicate Chinese banks have been sitting on large volumes of NPLs that have not yet been fully recognized. This is an open secret: The National Audit Office recently claimed in an annual audit report to the NPC that 16 of 43 audited banks last year had NPL levels that were double the officially reported figure…
Loan rollovers are a pervasive phenomenon in China…[T]he financial system…served as a shock absorber, channeling resources to enterprises facing losses to maintain output and prevent the defaults and bankruptcies that occurred in market economies.
Another Rhodium report finds that the proportion of loans made below benchmark rates has risen significantly since 2021, even though benchmark rates are lower than they were back then:
And the Dallas Fed has documented how more and more Chinese companies, especially in the real estate sector, aren’t making enough money to pay the interest on their loans:
All this — falling official NPLs, much more below-market lending, companies unable to pay their interest expenses, widespread suspicion that many of the companies whose loans are “performing” will never be able to repay those loans — matches the general pattern that Hoshi and Kashyap (2000) documented in post-bubble Japan. Banks have taken a bunch of losses, but have refused to recognize those losses, using a flood of cheap debt to keep their borrowers afloat.
A bunch of people have warned about this. Here’s Rhodium:
Because of the political incentives shaping China’s financial system, banks in China tend to extend or roll over debt to poorly performing or loss-making companies. This can have some of the same effects as a subsidy, by removing incentives for companies to stay profitable and isolating them from market forces that would otherwise lead to their restructuring or bankruptcy….Evergreening of credit, therefore, allows firms to…[reduce] domestic and global prices to unprofitable levels[.]
And here’s the Dallas Fed:
There is mounting evidence of “zombie lending” in China, banks rolling over bad loans to unprofitable firms and allowing the status quo to continue rather than recognize losses.
And here’s a Business Times story about how China’s government has allowed and even encouraged zombification, much as Japan did in the 1990s:
It’s impossible to quantify the true extent of the [bad debt] problem, though most economists say the ratio of bad loans is significantly higher than the 1.5 per cent official rate…One analyst at Absolute Strategy Research in London pegs it at about 10 per cent…Others say it could be double that amount…
While the [banks’] leniency [toward borrowers], largely condoned by regulators in Beijing, has helped maintain financial stability over the past few years, it also means the banking system is recycling capital into unproductive companies rather than spurring real growth in healthy firms…
[Government] officials have moved to bolster the nation’s six biggest banks with more than US$100 billion in fresh capital…[R]ather than cracking down on deadbeat borrowers, China’s banks are encouraged to cut them some slack. Regulators have for years urged the big banks to keep their reported bad loan ratio under 2 per cent, according to sources familiar with the guidance…As a result, banks routinely roll over maturing loans, extend repayment periods, or allow interest to be capitalised to avoid triggering NPL recognition.
Now you might be tempted to think — and I’ve seen a few people argue — that this only matters in a market economy. In a market economy, undercapitalized banks matter because banks have to succeed or fail on their own.
In a state-directedeconomy like China’s, the theory goes, debt on the banks’ books might as well be on the government’s books.1 Banks can keep lending no matter how much bad debt they have, because the only entity that could punish them — the Chinese government — wants them to do so.
But while government control might avert a financial crisis, it doesn’t automatically solve the zombie problem, or make the comparison with Japan inappropriate.
First of all, it would be a mistake to see Japan’s government in the 1990s as operating at arm’s length from Japanese banks. It most certainly did not; in fact, it acted to supportthe banks that were supporting the zombies.
The government bailed out the banks, deliberately turned a blind eye to the zombie problem, and encouraged banks to keep on lending to healthier companies despite the unrecognized bad loans on their books. That’s not too different from what China’s government seems to have done in response to the real estate bust, at least initially.
But simply having the government urge (or order) banks to keep lending didn’t solve the zombie problem in Japan, and it won’t solve it in China either. Even if the zombie companies don’t end up competing with healthier companies for capital, they compete with them for other resources.
They compete for labor — workers who could be working at young, growing, healthy companies are instead being paid to continue to work for unproductive companies that are just spinning their wheels. They also compete for raw materials, for land, for energy, and so on.
These resources are not in infinite supply, even in China. As long as unproductive zombie companies are hiring workers, hoovering up metals and chemicals and watts of electricity, and taking up prime real estate, they’re holding back the rest of the economy. This doesn’t just manifest as higher costs for healthy companies — it also shows up as increased competition.
In 1990s Japan, if a new retailer wanted to enter the scene, it had to compete with Daiei, the unproductive behemoth that was essentially being paid by banks to produce below cost. The same will be true in China.
In fact, this may be a reason for the “involution” that Chinese companies are experiencing. In the wake of the real estate bust, China’s government directed banks to lend to manufacturing companies instead of to real estate-related companies.
They did this (though some of the loans ended up sneaking back into the real estate sector). In fact, a large percent of the “subsidies” that China dishes out to its manufacturing companies is through below-market-rate loans.
Some of these manufacturing companies will be successful and efficient — indeed, many already have been. But others are unproductive and inefficient. Instead of letting these die, China’s banks may keep them on as zombies as well, paying them to compete with China’s healthier companies. Here’s Alicia Garcia-Herrero from back in March:
In many sectors, including…electric vehicles, solar panels, batteries, and other green technologies…Chinese firms…keep selling at rock-bottom levels, sometimes below what it costs to produce, just to hold onto market share. A growing number of these companies cannot earn enough revenue to even service their debt…
These “zombie” companies survive only because banks roll over loans and local governments provide subsidies to avoid job losses and keep tax revenues flowing…In newer, high-priority sectors like green tech, the share of zombie companies has hit 30 percent of total listed companies…
Without real productivity advances, [zombies] still join the price-slashing frenzy to stay in the game thanks to external support from banks or local governments. They cut prices aggressively…The outcome is predictable: collapsing profit margins across the board, even for the better companies, whose productivity is increasing.
When we Westerners think about the effect of Chinese zombification, we often think about the flood of cheap exports threatening to deindustrialize Europe and other regions. But while that export dominance might seem like a victory to China’s mercantilist leaders, it’s a double-edged sword, because zombification reduces productivity at home. In the long run, lower productivity hurts growth, despite the temporary bump from exports.
In other words, China’s fusion between the financial system and the state may have made zombification worse, not better. The Chinese state is not a ruthlessly efficient allocator of capital; it has sociopolitical goals just like any other state, and it fears the unrest that could result from widespread corporate failure and unemployment. Yes, it can tell banks to lend to manufacturers instead of property developers, but that just ends up adding more zombies to the horde.
And at some point, even state-owned and state-directed banks probably do care about profitability. Yes, the government can bail out any bank at will, but if you’re the bank executive or manager who dished out the bad loans and made a bailout necessary, your career might be over. This might be why corporate loans have started to fall slightly from the torrid pace of 2023-24:
Ultimately, when people write the story of China’s economy in the 2020s, zombification could end up being more fundamental to that story than exports. The parallels with Japan are not always real, but they’re real in this case — and so far, China’s government seems to be walking into a similar trap.
Update: In the comments, Jack Lowenstein asks a very important question: So what? Even if zombification proceeds in China, what are the downsides from the point of the Chinese government? He writes:
I think the critical difference between Japan’s “extend and pretend” policies and China’s is the geopolitical element.
Japan feared domestic social and political disruption – and was heavily influenced by “free market” vested interests. There was also a degree of denial by MOF and METI that the gogo years of the post-war period up to the mid 1980s were really over.
The CCP and the PRC however are driven by the deliberate aim of de industrialization of critical parts of the OECD supply chain. Loans and other support to the companies that will deliver this outcome are not going to stop for economic reasons.
Sadly policy makers in most of the countries suffering these effects are ideologically unwilling to enact anti-dumping and other defenses to respond. So zombification will not stop in China. Yes the population of the PRC will pay a price. But since when did the CCP care about that?
This is a very important question, and I should have probably gone into that more in the post. Here was my response to Jack in the comments:
I think some of these are real differences, but perhaps not all of them.
“Japan feared domestic social and political disruption” <– I actually don’t think this is a big difference. China is worried about social and political disruption as well — just look at how fast Xi ended Zero Covid after some small scattered protests. The old social compact in China was “growth in exchange for political quiescence.” But with rapid growth now over, that social compact is gone, so the possibility for unrest is definitely there.
“The CCP and the PRC however are driven by the deliberate aim of de industrialization of critical parts of the OECD supply chain. Loans and other support to the companies that will deliver this outcome are not going to stop for economic reasons.” <– This is true, and I think this is an argument FOR zombification. Unproductive, unprofitable companies that fill supply chain gaps will continue to be supported with evergreened loans.
So the question becomes: What are the downsides of zombification from the regime’s perspective? That’s a topic I should have considered more. One answer is “social unrest” — if slow growth makes the repressiveness of China’s regime less tolerable, then we could see popular anger at the industrial-policy regime. Remember that Japan was a very free society, where people could pivot from the pursuit of money to the pursuit of lifestyle and art and leisure. That’s not necessarily true in China.
Another possibility is that eventually China becomes more like the USSR. The USSR was famously unproductive, because it insisted on onshoring its entire supply chain. Right now, China looks hyper-competitive in a bunch of high-tech industries, but if zombies suck up more and more labor and other resources (including compute), that competitiveness could narrow over time.
Finally, there are fiscal dangers (https://rhg.com/research/chinas-financial-and-fiscal-decay/). When Europeans buy cheap Chinese EVs, part of the consumer surplus they receive comes out of the pockets of Chinese taxpayers and bondholders. Japan’s zombification caused it to run up an enormous amount of debt, which it was able to carry safely only thanks to A) persistently low demand and low natural interest rates, and B) the government’s ability to buy overseas assets that performed extremely well (https://www.ft.com/content/f7d3f20c-b303-4f6c-b4a0-8ee8906ae155). Now that the first of those has gone away, Japan’s government debt IS becoming a problem, with a plunging exchange rate and creeping inflation.
So while China’s government can get away with “damn the economics, full speed ahead” for a while, eventually I think something breaks…
Notes
1 And since that debt is owed almost entirely domestically, the theory says that the debt doesn’t really matter in a macroeconomic sense; it’s just some Chinese people owing money to other Chinese people.
This article was first published on Noah Smith’s Noahpinion Substack and is republished with kind permission. Become a Noahopinion subscriber here.
Caritas says record number of families sought assistance in Italy in 2025
Caritas Italia assisted 282,539 people in 2025, equivalent to the same number of family units as its support is directed at the needs of entire households, according to its annual report on poverty in Italy.
The figure is the highest ever recorded and represents a 1.7% increase compared with 2024. The report is based on information from 3,520 digitalised services across 206 Italian dioceses, covering 94.5% of all dioceses and around half of Caritas services nationwide.
According to the report, poverty is increasingly losing its exceptional and temporary nature, becoming a “structural normality.” It said there has been no decline compared with the period before the COVID-19 pandemic, indicating that poverty is becoming a stable condition for many families.
Among the most significant trends identified is the growing number of older people seeking assistance. Over the past decade, the number of people aged over 65 supported by the Caritas network has risen by 191%, compared with an overall increase in users of 48%.
The report said this reflects an increasingly close link between economic hardship, population ageing, health vulnerabilities, weakening family networks and social isolation. It also noted a rise in the number of people living alone, whose share increased from 23.8% to 32.9% over the same period.
Caritas said health-related needs, including psychological support, have increased by 69%. The report also highlighted the growing presence of working poor, particularly among people aged 35-44, where they account for 31.7% of those assisted, and those aged 45-54, where the figure is 31%. In 2015, the phenomenon stood at 13.3%.
Families with children remain the largest group seeking assistance, with 52% of those supported living with minor children.
Housing also remains a major concern, the report said. More than 24,000 homeless people were assisted, while growing numbers of households are struggling with rent, utility bills, routine housing costs and inadequate living conditions.
The report also recorded a post-pandemic high in chronic poverty and the intensity of poverty, indicating that many people assisted are moving further away from the minimum threshold of economic wellbeing and are remaining in poverty for longer periods.
At the same time, the share of people experiencing poverty for the first time fell to 37.6%. The report said the increase in average household ISEE income, from €4,315 to €4,974, should not be interpreted as an improvement in economic conditions, but rather as evidence that more families with slightly higher incomes are still experiencing hardship and require support.
Trump Plans to Protect Methane-Leaking Stripper Wells. This Billionaire Donor Will Benefit.
Reporting Highlights
Climate Rollbacks: Trump’s EPA is planning to weaken restrictions on oil and gas wells that produce very little energy but release vast amounts of methane.
A Wealthy Beneficiary: Oil billionaire Jeffery Hildebrand, a major Trump donor, is set to reap the benefits. Society as a whole will deal with the environmental costs.
The Influence Campaign: A former Hildebrand lobbyist now rewriting the EPA’s methane rules has solicited input from oil industry groups backed by the billionaire.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
It was before dawn on a Friday in January when a Gulfstream G600 with the burnt-orange Texas Longhorns logo on its tail landed at Dulles airport outside Washington, D.C. Its owner, a little-known oil billionaire named Jeffery Hildebrand, had been summoned to the White House.
By mid-afternoon he was in the East Room, just three seats from President Donald Trump, who had recently ordered the military raid that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. Now Trump wanted Hildebrand and two dozen other energy executives to commit to investing $100 billion in Venezuela’s decrepit oil industry.
Many couched their enthusiasm with caveats. ExxonMobil’s CEO called Venezuela “uninvestable” without changes to its legal system. The head of ConocoPhillips wanted U.S. government financing.
But Hildebrand, a major Trump donor whose wife had been named ambassador to Costa Rica, had already seen how loyalty could be rewarded. Even though he had no notable operations outside the U.S., he hunched toward a microphone and said in a halting voice, “Hilcorp is fully committed and ready to go to rebuilding the infrastructure in Venezuela.”
“That’s good,” Trump said. “You’ll be very happy.”
As the founder and owner of Hilcorp, a privately held company known for buying up old, low-producing “stripper wells,” Hildebrand needs Trump’s favor. Long one of the oil industry’s top polluters, Hilcorp releases unusually large quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas that can trap 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
Hildebrand had never been a leading political contributor. But in 2024, the Biden administration issued aggressive restrictions on methane pollution — rules that would impose steep costs on Hilcorp — and the once-obscure tycoon became one of Trump’s biggest oil industry supporters, giving millions to his campaign.
Hilcorp CEO Jeffery Hildebrand during a meeting with U.S. oil company executives at the White House on Jan. 9Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Trump has since named a former Hilcorp lobbyist to a top post at the Environmental Protection Agency, putting him in charge of an effort to unravel the methane rules with help from trade groups backed by Hildebrand, a ProPublica investigation has found. That will bring a sweeping reprieve for the nation’s 700,000 stripper wells, boosting Hildebrand’s profits while saddling society as a whole with the climate fallout.
Stripper wells collectively contribute just 6% of the nation’s oil and natural gas. But in recentstudies, scientists have identified them as the source of roughly half the sector’s methane emissions — in part because they tend to be thinly monitored, run-down and thus prone to leaking. As a result, these barely productive wells play an outsize role in climate change, disproportionately amplifying heat waves, droughts and wildfires.
In a world where global warming fixes can seem impossibly daunting, stripper wells are the rare low-hanging fruit, said Andrew Logan of Ceres, a climate advocacy group.
“If you could lose 6% of production and cut emissions in half, who wouldn’t make that trade?” Logan said. “It’s a question of who benefits and who doesn’t, and who has the power.”
“Well Vents Randomly”
Kendra Pinto and Josh Eisenfeld drove a rented Dodge Ram to the site of a Hilcorp well in San Juan County, New Mexico, last August. As infrared camera operators with the nonprofit Earthworks, they were used to roaming through remote areas to investigate leaks at oil and gas wells. But the San Juan is especially lonely terrain, with bumpy dirt roads snaking between scattered scrub and rusting pump jacks, the nodding apparatuses that lift oil and gas from thousands of feet underground.
A sign marked the site as Hilcorp’s Huerfano Unit 119 well, one of the company’s 11,000 in the region. It was little more than a patch of gravel hosting two unmarked storage tanks and what oil workers call a Christmas tree: the cluster of valves that caps the well itself. Drilled in 1969, the well now produces a small but steady trickle of natural gas, enough to generate around $50 of revenue per day.
On paper, it runs remarkably cleanly. According to New Mexico’s oil regulator, Hilcorp has not reported any “venting” — releasing gas — from the well since May 2024. At the site itself, however, a wire fence surrounded some of the equipment, bearing a yellow caution sign that read, “Well vents randomly.”
A Hilcorp installation in New Mexico in August 2025Courtesy of Earthworks
Methane is invisible to the human eye. But on June 29 last year, a satellite detected a massive methane plume erupting from this very location. According to the nonprofit Carbon Mapper, a NASA partner that one oil executive defined as a “platform to disseminate the sins of our industry,” the methane was being discharged at a rate of 199 kilograms an hour. That’s equivalent to about 12 times the volume of natural gas the well typically produces over that time. The cause was unknown, but according to scientists who have studied the issue, such “super-emitter” events typically stem from some kind of neglect or malfunction — if not from an intentional release. Most last a couple of hours, but some can go on for weeks. Super-emitter plumes have also been identified at other Hilcorp wells.
Pinto and Eisenfeld observed smaller, more persistent leaks as well. When they trained their infrared camera on one of the storage tanks, wispy clouds of pollution could be seen streaming from a pressure-release valve.
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“That shouldn’t just be constantly …” Eisenfeld said, trailing off. The finding was far from abnormal, though. Of the eight Hilcorp wells he and Pinto visited that day, seven were seen to be leaking.
In response to a detailed list of questions from ProPublica, Hilcorp spokesperson Nick Piatek said in an email that the Huerfano Unit 119 well “is fully compliant with state and federal regulations” and that the company inspects the site monthly. He also suggested that the company’s approach caused less environmental harm than drilling new wells: “By extending and optimizing the life of existing assets with pre-built infrastructure, our model limits the need for new development elsewhere.” The company is “proud,” he added, of recent efforts to reduce its emissions.
Hilcorp is hardly an outlier in its approach to methane releases. America’s oil and gas system is vast, aging, and in many places largely left to police itself. Of the country’s roughly 1 million active wells, more than two-thirds are stripper wells, each producing the equivalent of up to 15 barrels a day. Many produce less than a single barrel a day. (Newer wells, by contrast, can pump 1,000 a day or more.) Each well site, in turn, is equipped with numerous valves, flanges and other fittings that can leak unless inspected regularly. Some components were explicitly designed to vent small amounts of gas — a legacy of an era when methane’s role in global warming wasn’t widely understood.
A Hilcorp installation in New Mexico in MayCourtesy of Charlie Barrett/Oilfield Witness
Methane, the main component of natural gas, turns into carbon dioxide when burned to heat a home or generate electricity. But when the gas enters the atmosphere directly, it becomes a much more powerful climate pollutant — one that is responsible for one-third of the rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution.
Methane exists underground alongside other fossil fuels and is brought to the surface whether oil or natural gas is being pumped. While it’s a valuable product in itself, capturing it is not always cost-effective. So companies often burn it off, or just vent it, sending it straight into the atmosphere. Apart from the climate impact, this is all sheer waste, as none of the methane’s energy is being harnessed for a human need. Yet with few exceptions, federal rules have allowed these practices at wells drilled before 2012 — which include the overwhelming majority of stripper wells.
Methane leakage is such a routine part of oil and gas production that the EPA often assumes it is happening when asking the industry to calculate its emissions. Even so, those numbers drastically understate the actual emissions observed by plane and satellite. A study led by Evan Sherwin of Stanford, published in the journal Nature in 2024, took close to a million measurements to find that the true figures were, on average, nearly three times higher. Partly that is because companies have never had to report super-emitter events to the EPA. In one region, nearly 10% of all the natural gas produced was being lost to the atmosphere, the study found.
But limiting methane pollution presents a rare opportunity. While carbon dioxide can persist in the atmosphere for centuries, methane breaks down relatively fast, in about a dozen years. Halting these releases, then, would bring a swift payoff.
“Methane is the best lever we have to slow the march of climate change in our lifetime,” said Stanford researcher Rob Jackson. That is especially important, he added, as the planet approaches tipping points — temperature thresholds beyond which forests, coral reefs and ice sheets start to collapse irreversibly.
Unlike with other major methane sources, such as belching cattle or melting permafrost, the technology to curb emissions from oil and gas operations is already viable, and fairly cheap. In the fight against global warming, Jackson said, “It’s the best bang for our buck.”
The “Dung Beetle Model”
To build a fortune on the discarded scraps of the oil and gas industry takes a rare instinct for hidden value, an appetite for risk and an obsession with keeping costs down.
Among the nation’s stripper well owners, Hildebrand has done it best, amassing a fortune estimated by Bloomberg at $15 billion. Yet at a time when many billionaires are embracing celebrity, he has maintained an unusually low profile. At 67, he’s almost completely avoided speaking to reporters, and he didn’t respond to multiple interview requests from ProPublica. Even Trump, despite having invited him to the White House, seemed hazy on Hildebrand’s role in the oil industry. “I hear he does a good job,” the president said when reached by ProPublica on his cellphone.
While he avoids the public eye, Hildebrand circulates openly in the overlapping worlds of wealthy businesspeople, private clubs and Republican power brokers. He has been known to hold exclusive parties at his 1,200-acre ranch in Aspen, Colorado — which used to belong, in part, to the musician (and environmentalist) John Denver. He also owns a polo team called Tonkawa, a fixture of the winter season in the sport’s unofficial capital of Wellington, Florida, a short drive from Mar-a-Lago. A video of a 2021 match shows him in a white helmet and forest-green jersey, riding a bay pony as he swings his mallet, trying and failing to keep the ball from the opposing side’s patron, a Russian banker named Andrey Borodin.
There’s a striking tension between Hildebrand’s status as one of the country’s most prolific polluters and his otherwise conventional life as a God-fearing, upstanding Texas businessman. He is less a rogue actor than the product of a deeply American system that rewards production at all costs.
A devout Catholic and philanthropist, he is especially passionate about wildlife conservation, according to Stuart Stedman and Karen Starr Hunke, fellow board members at Texas A&M’s Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute. Yet they and others who know him through the institute said they’d never once heard him mention climate change — an omission that points to a far narrower view of environmental stewardship.
The closest Hildebrand has come to addressing the issue publicly is in a rare speech he gave in 2022, accepting an award as a distinguished alumnus at UT Austin. A husky, square-jawed man, he wore a burnt-orange suit jacket and a burnt-orange tie. He cited an old quote he interpreted as a celebration of the oil industry: “Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth.” Then he quipped that “in this Green New Deal era we live in” — a reference to the Democrats’ climate agenda — such sentiments might no longer be welcome.
Jeffery Hildebrand owns and plays on a polo team called Tonkawa.Joel Auerbach/Getty Images
Born in 1959 in Houston, America’s energy capital, Hildebrand graduated from high school at a time when oil prices were soaring. Determined to start his own oil business, he studied geology and petroleum engineering at UT Austin, where he was in the Kappa Alpha fraternity. He worked briefly for Exxon and a few other companies, including that of a prominent Houston investor named Jack Trotter, before starting Hilcorp in ’89 with Trotter’s backing.
The oil business is filled with stories of crazy risks, near-bankruptcies and improbable rebounds. Hildebrand likes to recount that he used his wife’s car as collateral for a loan to drill some early wells. In a speech for his induction into the Texas Business Hall of Fame, he said they turned out to be “dry holes” — failures — but the return on Melinda’s investment would prove “infinite” (only a slight exaggeration).
He started buying stripper wells from larger companies, a niche that is relatively cheap to break into. As a well ages and the underlying reservoir is depleted, pressure in the well drops, and production along with it. The price for a package of these wells tends to be low — one friend recalled “when a big deal for Jeff was $5 million” — but to turn a profit, the new owners have to cut costs. Typically they do this by playing fast and loose with environmental rules, according to Clark Williams-Derry of the nonprofit Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, who calls this the “dung beetle model.”
As Hildebrand expanded into other states, loading up on debt to make ever larger acquisitions, there’s evidence he followed this model. According to records obtained by ProPublica from state and federal environmental regulators, his company has racked up dozens of violations over the past decade. To cite one notable example, after a Hilcorp natural gas pipeline ruptured in Alaska’s Cook Inlet in December 2016, it spewed methane for nearly four months until it was finally repaired. Activists across the country call the company “Spillcorp.”
The penalties, though, have largely amounted to a slap on the wrist, rarely exceeding $500,000 — and often coming in far lower. “I would frankly put that in the category of just operating costs,” said Matt Bernstein, an analyst at the research firm Rystad Energy.
What set Hildebrand apart from other “dung beetles” was that he also found ways to squeeze out more oil and gas from aging wells, not only cutting costs but increasing revenue. His secret was what he has called a “pretty simple” formula: attract top geologists and engineers by offering Wall Street-style incentives, allowing them to effectively take partnership stakes in projects. According to a person involved in an early deal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Hildebrand would offer 1.1 times what Hilcorp’s own analysis said an acquisition was worth, betting on the “magic” of his team.
The 2010s saw the landmark Paris Agreement on global warming, the rise of teen activist Greta Thunberg and the first pledge by a major oil company to effectively zero its emissions. None of that dissuaded Hildebrand from doubling down on aging wells. In 2017, he spent $3 billion to mount his largest acquisition yet: ConocoPhillips’ operation in the San Juan Basin, where Pinto and Eisenfeld would later identify so many leaks. Once among the country’s top sources of natural gas, the region had since fallen into decline — and it was already notorious for its methane pollution.
Soon after, according to a Clean Air Task Force analysis of data companies report to the EPA, Hilcorp became the No. 1 emitter of methane in the entire U.S. oil and gas industry.
Washington Comes for Stripper Wells
President Joe Biden presented the first serious threat to Hildebrand’s business. As part of his ambitious climate agenda, the EPA issued rules aimed at cutting methane pollution from oil and gas operations by a whopping 80% — and they took direct aim at stripper wells.
For the first time, outside a patchwork of state rules, older wells would face requirements for regular leak inspections and limits on venting and flaring. Companies would be forced to respond to satellite reports of super-emitters, making repairs if necessary. A fee would also be imposed on excess methane emissions, costing the oil and gas industry an estimated $500 million a year.
Even the Department of Justice got involved, filing suits to crack down on improper methane releases. One found that Hilcorp had failed to capture the emissions when it redrilled 145 wells in the San Juan — discharges large enough that Don Schreiber, a rancher who documented some of the events, described hearing a “jet engine” sound as the gas rushed into the air. This time, the penalties were more than a slap on the wrist; although Hilcorp did not admit to wrongdoing, it settled the allegations for $9.4 million.
With the new rules gradually being phased in, Hildebrand effectively made parallel bets. Getting a jump on compliance, Hilcorp started upgrading much of its aging equipment — and its methane numbers declined.
“That’s a win,” said Lesley Feldman of the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit that advocates for cutting emissions. “That means the policy is working. And we’ve seen evidence of other companies doing this too.”
Yet while Feldman celebrated the reductions, she did question their magnitude. Hilcorp spokesperson Piatek said the company’s methane numbers had fallen by “nearly 80% in recent years.” But, Feldman said after examining Hilcorp’s most recent data, that decline is artificially inflated by recent changes to the reporting rules, which make comparisons to previous years misleading. The data itself may be suspect, she added, because the EPA has yet to publicly verify it — and Hilcorp has previously made huge upward revisions to its reported emissions. (Piatek didn’t respond when ProPublica pointed out the artificially inflated reduction.)
Even taking the numbers at face value, Hilcorp remains one of the oil industry’s top methane emitters, according to a ProPublica analysis of EPA data.
Since he was still looking at substantial compliance costs, Hildebrand’s other bet was to step up his political contributions. Since 2020, he and his wife have given more than $15 million to Trump and other Republicans in federal races, placing them among the top donors in an industry that overwhelmingly supports the president and his party. (That compares to just over $3 million in the entire two decades prior.) The recipients have included Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. August Pfluger, both of Texas — two of the most vocal opponents to the methane fee, which they call the “natural gas tax.”
During the 2024 campaign, Hildebrand also co-hosted at least three high-dollar fundraisers for Trump, who promised to “unleash American energy” by dismantling climate regulations. One was a lavish dinner held a short drive from Hildebrand’s Aspen ranch, at a home sprinkled with art by Andy Warhol (a tiny self-portrait), Damien Hirst (a mirrored pill cabinet) and Jack Pierson (mismatched lettering that spelled out the word “badass”). The home belonged to another donor later graced with an appointment: the investor John Phelan, who would briefly serve as Trump’s Navy secretary.
Hildebrand co-hosted two of the fundraisers in Houston. One was reportedly scheduled to take place at his own home, but, due to security concerns, it was moved to a hotel owned by the sports and entertainment magnate Tilman Fertitta, who would be named ambassador to Italy. The other was followed by a private roundtable where, according to Teofilo Lingi, an investor who was present, oil executives discussed the methane rules with Trump himself.
The Rollback
At a previous event with Trump, Hildebrand said, “I’m really here today to represent the independent energy companies, the family-owned businesses that are in this industry.”
This mom-and-pop image clashes with the reality that the independents, as they are known, are highly organized into an alphabet soup of newly influential lobbying groups — with Hildebrand a member of several. Hilcorp CEO Greg Lalicker sits on the board of the American Exploration and Production Council (AXPC), which also represents Diversified, the country’s single largest owner of stripper wells. At least until recently, another Hilcorp executive was a director at the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), which represents smaller producers, including many stripper well owners.
In an industry long hostile to regulation, the independents have often displayed a more open contempt toward climate policy than the global oil giants. And they have historically had little say in emissions rules. “They didn’t want to be regulated, but they kind of knew that was a losing argument,” said Joseph Goffman, who held top EPA roles under both President Barack Obama and Biden.
Hildebrand received an early sign that was going to change when, less than three weeks after the 2025 inauguration, Trump tapped his wife to be ambassador to Costa Rica — even though she was primarily known for charity work and for opening a doughnut shop in their wealthy Houston neighborhood of River Oaks. Melinda Hildebrand didn’t respond to requests for comment, but when ProPublica asked Trump why he appointed her, he said, “I don’t know, because you know, I get recommendations. … I see the list of people, but we only name good people, and I’m sure she’s very good.”
Later that month, the Republican-controlled Congress effectively killed the methane fee, and Trump nominated a former Hilcorp lobbyist named Aaron Szabo to oversee the EPA’s climate regulations.
Szabo, an otherwise inconspicuous former bureaucrat, helped to unite two distinct networks with overlapping ambitions. As a lobbyist for Hilcorp and other oil and gas companies, he had already helped to draft a letter from the AXPC opposing the new methane rules. He then became a fellow at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute and gave advice on climate regulations for the EPA chapter of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the deregulatory blueprint for the second Trump administration. The chapter specifically recommended dismantling the program to address super-emitters.
Now tasked with rewriting the methane rules, Szabo has been seeking input from oil industry groups including the AXPC, the IPAA and the National Stripper Well Association (NSWA), according to interviews with industry representatives and current and former EPA officials, records of closed-door conversations, and agency emails and calendar entries obtained through public records requests by the watchdog group Fieldnotes and shared with ProPublica.
“It’s the first time in 20 years of my business that they’ll even answer the phone,” NSWA Chair Patrick Montalban told ProPublica, referring to top regulators. He described an informal atmosphere where independent oil executives called on old personal connections to open the doors. He himself had met not just with Szabo but with EPA chief Lee Zeldin, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright. He and Wright, he noted, have both served on the board of yet another oil industry group. (Press offices for the departments of Interior and Energy didn’t respond to emails seeking comment.)
The IPAA’s Lee Fuller, on a private conference call with industry representatives, also spoke glowingly about a meeting with Szabo’s office last year. Previously, he said, the EPA had never even considered the group’s requests to create separate methane rules for stripper wells. This time, though, agency staff brought it up unprompted — which suggests that it was already on Szabo’s agenda. Presented with this opening, the IPAA later asked for stripper wells to be exempted from the methane rules entirely.
Hilcorp spokesperson Piatek declined to answer questions from ProPublica about the influence campaign. The IPAA also declined to comment but sent an email linking to a recent statement of support for deregulating stripper wells that nonetheless nodded toward “our shared environmental goals.”
The heart of the stripper-well owners’ argument is that they simply cannot afford to be regulated. “Venting and flaring are essential for the survivability of low production wells,” an IPAA lawyer named James D. Elliott wrote in an email to EPA officials last year. He cited estimates that the methane rules would force 300,000 of the lowest-producing wells to shut down. Framing this as a blow to small-business owners, he didn’t acknowledge that it would have almost no impact on the U.S. energy supply.
The AXPC declined to answer ProPublica’s questions about the group’s interactions with Szabo’s staff but sent a statement from CEO Anne Bradbury saying its members were “committed to building on a legacy of world-leading methane emission reductions.” In a “policy roadmap” published on its website in March, however, it asked the EPA to “incorporate greater flexibility for low-producing and mature assets.”
Some members of the coalition have argued, inaccurately, that stripper wells are not significant sources of methane pollution. In a Zoom interview with ProPublica, NSWA board member Sam Bradley played a slideshow that he said he’d shared with Szabo’s staff. One slide purported to show the emissions from various sources. Stripper wells ranked lower than both the collective exhalations of the U.S. populace and what Bradley called “smoke and brisket” — barbecues. (In reality, these are negligiblesources of emissions.)
Hildebrand and his fellow stripper-well owners appear likely to win exemptions. Speaking with industry representatives last month, the AXPC’s Wendy Kirchoff shared early details of Szabo’s plan to weaken the methane rules, confirming it will cover stripper wells, according to a recording reviewed by ProPublica.
Szabo himself didn’t respond to questions sent by ProPublica, and the EPA’s press office declined to comment on the details. But the agency confirmed it is working on a proposal to “provide relief” to the oil industry, saying in a statement, “We heard consistently from American oil and natural gas producers (shocker that we meet with stakeholders) that the Biden-Harris Administration’s oil and gas methane regulations were unworkable and unnecessarily restricted American energy dominance.”
To protect carve-outs from rollback by a future Democratic administration, Pfluger, the representative from Texas, and Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., have proposed a bill to simply exempt stripper wells from EPA emissions rules — allowing them to pollute the atmosphere at will, with scant economic benefit. The NSWA and the IPAA both helped to craft the legislation, according to an internal newsletter from a state trade group that represents many stripper-well owners.
In effect, the Trump administration and its allies in Congress are weighing whether to preserve the business model that made Hildebrand rich, no matter the cost to the global climate. As energy assets, his wells may be marginal. But as political currency, they have become more valuable than ever before.
Critical Copilot vulnerability allowed hackers to seal 2FA code from users
Last Tuesday, Microsoft patched a vulnerability it rated as max critical in its M365 Copilot AI platform. On Monday, the researchers who discovered the vulnerability and reported it to Microsoft revealed how their proof-of-concept exploit could retrieve 2FA codes and other sensitive data from emails accessible to Copilot.
Microsoft and other LLM providers have been unable to prevent their products from complying with malicious requests to reveal data. The root cause: AI bots are unable to distinguish between instructions provided by users and those snuck into third-party content the models are summarizing, drafting responses to, or using to perform other actions on behalf of the user. With no way to secure this crucial boundary, Microsoft and its peers are left to erect complicated and ad hoc guardrails designed to rein in the consequences of this incurable gullibility.
Jumping over guardrails
One guardrail built into Copilot and most other LLMs prevents them from submitting web forms, sending emails, and taking similar actions that can be used to exfiltrate data from the user. To work around this, LLM hackers turned to markup language, which, among other things, allows users to add formatting elements such as headings, lists, and links to text without the need for HTML tags. Another workaround is to wrap sensitive data inside HTML tags such as and
To bring about the Parameter-to-Prompt Injection an attacker sends the target an email that contains the URL with the syntax https://m365.cloud.microsoft/search/?auth=2&origindomain=microsoft365&q=. The field contains an instruction. Copilot readily complied.
“The search functionality is exactly what attackers need, because even with limited capabilities, a user with access to critical information is enough,” the researchers wrote Monday. “To exfiltrate the data, an attacker crafts a URL that tells Copilot to ‘Search the user’s emails,’ extract the title, and embed it in an image URL.” The victim doesn’t type anything. They click a link, and Copilot does the rest.
Normally, the guardrail wrapping output in blocks would kick in. But the researchers discovered that the protection fires only after the “thinking” phase. Prior to that, Copilot generated its response using raw HTML, which is temporarily rendered in the browser DOM.
The researchers wrote:
So, the sequence looks like this:
Copilot starts streaming its response, which includes an tag
The browser sees the , renders it, and fires off an HTTP request to the src URL
Copilot finishes generating. The guardrail wraps everything in
Too late! The request already left.
The researchers now had an image request firing from the target’s browser. The problem, as noted earlier, is that Copilot won’t send image requests to most websites. To scale this guardrail, the exploit chain used Microsoft’s Bing search engine as a trampoline of sorts. Per the Copilot content security policy, Bing is among the sites permitted to send such requests. Bing would then send the request to the attacker-controlled domain that was included in the request. The request looked something like this:
“Since SearchLeak targets the Enterprise tier of Microsoft, the blast radius isn’t limited to personal data—it’s able to surface anything the user has access to inside the organization including emails, meeting invites and notes,” company researchers wrote. “SharePoint documents, OneDrive files, and other indexed business content. Depending on how M365 is connected to the environment, the blast radius could extend even wider.”
As noted, Microsoft fixed the vulnerabilities that SearchLeak exploited on Tuesday. With no known way to fix the underlying cause of such SNAFUs, however, attackers will inevitably find new ways to circumvent the newly constructed guardrails, and the process will repeat all over again.
