Authored by Naziya Alvi Rahman via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Australian Parliament has passed two new bills that will set up a national gun buyback scheme, and attempt to combat anti-Semitism and hate speech in response to the Bondi terror attack.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on Jan. 19, 2026. Hilary Wardhaugh/Getty Images

In Australia’s lower house, the gun buyback bill passed 96 to 45 with the Liberal-National Coalition opposing, while the hate and extremism-focused bill passed with amendments, securing 116 votes to just seven.

Later on the evening of Jan. 20, both bills made it through the Senate.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wrote on X that the government was “standing against hate and strengthening” national security.

New Gun Buyback Passes Lower House After 3 Hours

The Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Firearms and Customs Laws) Bill 2026 introduces not only the national gun buyback scheme, but new restrictions around background checks, the sale of firearm types, and new offences relating to accessing information online about firearms, ammunition, and accessories.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke told parliament that had such measures been in place earlier, the Bondi Beach attackers would not have been able to legally obtain weapons.

The father of the terrorist duo, Sajid Akram, owned six firearms, despite his son being interviewed and cleared by intelligence agencies over concerns of radicalisation.

The bill was debated for close to three hours, with several MPs proposing amendments.

Independent MP Zali Steggall sought to ensure firearms background checks explicitly included “criminal history or proceedings relating to domestic violence or AVOs issued in local courts.”

Bob Katter, the federal MP of Kennedy, moved an amendment that would automatically revoke a firearm licence for anyone placed on an ASIO watchlist. That amendment was defeated, 88 votes to 13.

Katter, who opposed the broader reforms, blamed the Bondi attack on failures in the immigration system and argued the legislation undermined gun ownership.

“If they get their way, then the only people that will have guns are the people in uniforms. And we know what sort of society that is, that the only people that have guns are the people in uniforms,” he said.

Member for Kennedy Bob Katter speaks to the media at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia on Jan. 20, 2026. Hilary Wardhaugh/Getty Images

Nationals Leader Warns Gun Control a Diversion From Real Issue

Nationals leader David Littleproud opposed the bill, describing it as a diversion.

“This is nothing more than a cheap political diversion, a cheap political diversion that is not facing up to the real problem in this country, which is radical Islamists,” Littleproud said.

He argued the Bondi attack reflected failures in enforcement rather than licensing.

“The fact is, the authorities did not act and take away the licence and the weapons as they should have,” he said.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese defended the reforms, stressing they were not aimed at lawful firearm owners.

“This legislation is not about targeting farmers. It’s not about competitive shooters. It’s not about … law-abiding firearm owners,” he said.

“The federal bill will establish a national gun buyback scheme to purchase surplus, newly banned and illegal firearms. The gun buybacks scheme is based on the same scheme that was introduced under John Howard, Tim Fischer and Kim Beazley, three leaders who all stood up at an important moment for Australia.”

Victims Only Need to Feel Fear Under New Hate Laws

The Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Criminal and Migration Laws) Bill 2026 also passed with amendments from the opposition.

The legislation introduces a new federal offence making it illegal to publicly promote or incite racial hatred where the conduct would cause a reasonable person to feel intimidated, harassed or fearful of violence.

The offence applies to speech, symbols, gestures and online communication targeting people “because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the target.”

The law does not require proof that hatred was actually generated or that a victim felt fear—only that the conduct itself would reasonably cause intimidation or fear.

Maximum penalties of up to five years’ imprisonment apply, with higher penalties for aggravated offences, including cases involving religious officials or attempts to radicalise children. A narrow defence applies where speech or writing consists solely of quoting religious texts for teaching or discussion.

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley confirmed Liberal MPs supported the amended bill.

“In the national interest, the Liberal party has today stepped up to fix legislation that the Albanese government badly mishandled,” Ley said in a statement issued after passing of the bill.

Ley said the amendments narrowed the bill’s scope to anti-Semitism and Islamic extremism, ensured new powers focused on serious criminal conduct, and required consultation with the opposition before extremist organisations could be listed or de-listed.

Crossbench Concerns About Bill’s Scope and Speed

Independent Teal MP Allegra Spender criticised both major parties for removing anti-vilification provisions from the bill, saying those measures had been sought by Jewish community groups and the government’s anti-Semitism envoy.

“My question is, what are the mechanisms you are saying that we can use now because you have rejected something that the Jewish community has been calling for a long time,” she said.

Spender warned that the current law was not specific enough, arguing Muslim and other migrant groups could be made to feel “suspect by association by failing to confront hateful individuals and ideologies directly.”

Independent “Teal” Member for Wentworth Allegra Spender speaks in the House of Representatives at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia on Jan. 19, 2026. Hilary Wardhaugh/Getty Images

“We drift towards a culture of guilt by association rather than accountability,” she said.

Independent MP Helen Haines also raised concerns about the legislative process.

“The inquiry into this bill was only tabled this morning,” she said. “But the consequence of haste, as a legislator, is the missed opportunity to carefully consider and improve this significant legislation.”

United States Antimony Corporation announced this morning that it has completed the acquisition of a fully operational critical minerals flotation facility in Radersburg, Montana, strengthening the company’s domestic processing footprint for antimony and other strategic minerals. As a reminder and as we noted late last year, UAMY operates the only two antimony smelters in North America.

The company said it closed on the $4.75 million all-cash purchase of the property and equipment on January 16, 2026. The Radersburg facility, located between Helena and Bozeman, sits within roughly 250 miles of US Antimony’s Thompson Falls smelter, which is currently undergoing a major expansion and modernization that remains on track for completion and commissioning in February.

According to the company’s press release, the Radersburg Mill is equipped with both gravity and flotation circuits, allowing it to concentrate a wide range of minerals, including stibnite, the primary ore mineral for antimony, as well as gold, silver, copper, tungsten, and other metals. The facility includes crushing and grinding circuits, slurry-based recovery systems, and tailings storage ponds with water recycling capabilities.

Gravity concentration equipment at the site has historically been used to produce high-grade gold concentrates, while the flotation circuits can be tailored with specific reagents to recover various metals. The company noted the mill has previously processed gold, silver, copper, lead, and zinc, and could be adapted to concentrate cobalt, tungsten, platinum group metals, rare earth elements, and other critical minerals.

In addition to the purchase price, US Antimony has budgeted approximately $2 million for future capital improvements to enhance specific equipment at the facility.

Commenting on the acquisition, Chairman and CEO Gary C. Evans said the flotation mill is a necessary link in the company’s production chain. “In order for us to concentrate our raw ore from both Alaska and Montana, we must first utilize a modern flotation mill to properly concentrate the material to a high enough level that we can then feed the various furnaces located in our smelters in order to produce mil-spec antimony trisulfide,” Evans said.

He added that owning the Radersburg facility outright provides greater operational control compared with leasing. US Antimony previously leased a similar mill in Philipsburg, Montana, but canceled that lease in September 2025 after negotiations with the owners became difficult. “Making necessary capital improvements to a leased facility versus one that we control 100% made this an easy decision,” Evans said.

Evans described the acquisition as another step in reinforcing the company’s vertically integrated model. “This transaction announced today is another ‘leg on our stool’ as a fully integrated antimony company in order to maximize profitability, control our destiny, and meet the ever-growing needs of our customers whether they be industrial or the federal government,” he said.

United States Antimony announced in Q4 last year that it had received a $10 million delivery order under its newly signed indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity sole-source contract with the US Defense Logistics Agency. The order covered 315,000 lbs. of antimony metal ingots, which will be used to replenish the US National Defense Stockpile.

Antimony, a critical mineral which is used in munitions, batteries, flame retardants, and military-grade compounds, has been flagged by defense officials as a vulnerability in the U.S. industrial base.

The Trump administration has made domestic supply-chain resilience a policy priority. Trump has taken a series of executive and policy actions aimed at securing U.S. access to critical minerals, citing national security and economic independence.

Recall, last year we laid out all the winners in the coming critical mineral scramble in “The Coming Rare Earth Revolution And How To Profit: All You Need To Know About The “Ex-China Supply Chain.” Those who put on the recommended baskets are currently enjoying high double-digit gains. 

Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

CBS’s “60 Minutes” finally aired its report on the Trump administration’s deportations, more than a month after the segment was taken down from the program’s lineup.

Guards stand outside a cell block at the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT) in Tecoluca, El Salvador, on April 4, 2025. Alex Peña/Getty Images

In the report, broadcast on Jan. 18, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi examined deportees sent to El Salvador’s maximum-security prison, known by its Spanish acronym CECOT. It aired without any mention of the story having previously been pulled from its originally scheduled date, Dec. 21, 2025.

The unaired segment nevertheless appeared online a day after it was pulled. Global TV, which airs “60 Minutes” in Canada, briefly featured the piece on its app, apparently by mistake.

CBS News said in an emailed statement to The Epoch Times that its leadership “has always been committed to airing the ‘60 Minutes’ CECOT piece as soon as it was ready.”

“Tonight, viewers get to see it, along with other important stories, all of which speak to CBS News’ independence and the power of our storytelling,” it said.

The segment, titled “Inside CECOT,” featured interviews with two Venezuelan men being held in the Salvadoran prison after being deported from the United States.

Last year, as part of an effort to deliver what President Donald Trump has said will be the largest deportation of illegal immigrants in U.S. history, he invoked the wartime Enemy Aliens Act to fast-track the removal of alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The Trump administration paid the Salvadoran government millions of dollars to send more than 200 of those Venezuelan deportees to CECOT.

The two Venezuelans interviewed by “60 Minutes” described conditions inside the prison, which they said included beatings, living in cramped cells where the lights stayed on 24 hours a day, and being forced to kneel for hours at a time.

The report was largely unchanged from the Dec. 22 version. The updated version included a short clip of Trump saying that CECOT has “very strong facilities” where security staff “don’t play games,” and another of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt saying that “heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, sexual assaulters, predators who have no right to be in this country” were sent there.

Alfonsi’s introduction was updated to open with the Jan. 3 military operation that led to the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, who is currently in U.S. custody awaiting trial on federal narco-terrorism charges. In the new material, she also said she obtained data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement suggesting 33 of the 252 Venezuelan prisoners had been convicted of a crime in the United States, and reiterated a statistic from the original report that eight had been convicted of a violent or potentially violent offense.

In the segment, Alfonsi said the Department of Homeland Security declined her request for an on-camera interview and referred questions about the prison to the government of El Salvador, which did not respond. DHS did, however, provide an explanation for why it would not share detailed records about the individuals sent to CECOT.

“We are confident in our law enforcement’s intelligence, and we aren’t going to share intelligence reports and undermine national security every time a gang member denies he is one,” DHS wrote in an email to CBS News shown in the segment. “That would be insane.”

Authored by Terrence Keeley via RealClearWorld,

The 56th Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum convening in Davos on January 19-23 will be the first without its founder, Klaus Schwab. WEF’s new organizers should use the occasion to distance themselves from Schwab’s worst ideas: stakeholder capitalism, ESG investing and the net-zero energy paradigm.

Stakeholder capitalism is a concept invented by Schwab. Schwab’s argued for years that capitalism governed by shareholders would be vastly improved by systematically elevating the inputs of other stakeholders, like employees, supply chains, community values and the environment. ESG investing is the analytic framework upon which stakeholder capitalism largely depends. ESG rating agents use non-financial metrics to identify the “best” and “worst” companies to overweight, underweight or exclude in investment portfolios. Stakeholder capitalists broadly embraced the net-zero energy paradigm, aka “Paris +1.5°C by 2050 at all costs”. Net-zero commitments led many European countries to spend trillions on wind and solar investments at the expense of more reliable, more resilient and considerably cheaper energy alternatives, including fossil fuels. WEF’s acolytes have cheered them on as they did.

All of these concepts have harmed humanity. It’s crucial to understand how – and to stop misrepresenting them.

Stakeholder capitalism wrongly places responsibility for market failures on corporations. But corporations don’t define market opportunities: consumers and regulators do. Stakeholder capitalists have told oil and gas companies to stop production even when demand for their products and services continued to grow unabated. Stakeholder capitalists instruct companies to do things those company owners do not want or support. That’s not capitalism: that’s communism.

Private companies perpetually debate how and where societal values and their financial valuations align. No company can succeed without keeping their customers loyal and happy. Bureaucratic regulations and quixotic ESG metrics provide no useful information about how companies can better serve their clients: in fact, they often give destructive advice. The infamous Bud Light commercial that was meant to expand its appeal among marginalized communities resulted in a 25% market share decline. Milton Friedman claimed in his defining treatise, The Social Responsibility of Business, corporations must broadly reflect the ethics and priorities of those they serve. To not do so is self-immolating. Friedman was and remains 100% correct. Embracing values not widely shared destroys financial valuations for no tangible social gain.

By prioritizing stakeholder needs, environmental, social and governance investment mandates pledged to generate superior market returns alongside tangible societal benefit. They failed to deliver either. As opposed to impact investing, which verifiably brings about change intended by the investor, ESG investing has neither done much good nor very well. ESG’s broad underperformance was presciently anticipated by Vanguard’s fabled founder, John Bogle. Bogle rightly observed that, to optimize long-run investment performance, investors should own the whole market at the cheapest possible price. ESG investment funds willfully violate both of these common sense principles.

Companies that consistently operate in their shareholders’ best long-term interests are legally, financially and morally superior to those which attempt to prioritize other, more amorphous priorities. Investors who want their capital to improve environmental and social outcomes should abandon ESG investing and embrace impact investing. Trillions of dollars of public capital invested in solar and wind farms have saddled European consumers with electricity bills that are four times higher than those born by their counterparts in the US and China. Over-reliance on renewables also created energy intermittency that led to the deaths of seven Spanish and one Portuguese citizen in April 2025. All-of-the-above national energy strategies which embrace fossil fuels, nuclear and renewables create greater reliability, resilience and affordability. No country should abandon fossil fuels unless and until they have found more reliable, more abundant and cheaper alternatives.

In the closing paragraphs of the General Theory, John Maynard Keynes observed “The ideas of economists and political theorists – both when they are right and when they are wrong – are more powerful than is commonly understood.”

For WEF to best serve the common good, they should repudiate the wrong ideas their founder Klaus Schwab helped popularize. WEF will never be a respected voice for human flourishing until the forum returns to time-honored, proven ideas: free market principles coupled with effective philanthropy, authentic impact investment and sound public policy.

Terrence R Keeley is the CEO of the Impact Evaluation Lab and Author of Sustainable: Moving Beyond ESG to Impact Investing.