H. Rahman is a Jadetimes news reporter covering the USA
Image Souce: Emily Elconin, Getty Images
At least four people were killed and several others injured after a man drove a vehicle into a Michigan church, opened fire with a rifle, and set the building ablaze during Sunday services, authorities said.
The suspect, identified as 40-year-old Thomas Jacob Sanford from nearby Burton, died in an exchange of gunfire with responding officers in the church’s parking lot, Grand Blanc Township Police Chief William Renye confirmed. Hundreds of worshippers were attending The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Grand Blanc, a suburb of Flint, when the attack occurred.
Police said Sanford rammed a pickup truck into the church, fired multiple rounds at congregants, and deliberately ignited the building using an accelerant, believed to be gasoline. Videos from the scene showed flames and smoke engulfing the church, which was later declared a total loss by authorities. Ten people sustained gunshot injuries, including two fatalities; one victim remains in critical condition while the others are stable. Authorities continue to search the building for additional victims.
The FBI is leading the investigation, treating the incident as an act of targeted violence. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) confirmed that suspected explosive devices were found at the scene, though it remains unclear if they were used to start the fire. Michigan State Police are also responding to bomb threats across the community, and multiple nearby churches were searched and cleared.
Sanford, a U.S. Marine veteran who served in Japan and Iraq, had a history of military service, according to family posts and public records. Police arrived on the scene within 30 seconds of receiving the emergency call, engaging Sanford and neutralizing him within minutes.
Local officials praised the quick response of first responders and congregants who helped evacuate children and others from the church. Grand Blanc Township Supervisor Scott Bennett described the incident as “heartbreaking” and pledged support for victims and the community as authorities continue recovery efforts.
The investigation is ongoing as law enforcement seeks to determine the motive and ensure the safety of the area.
C. Janith is a Jadetimes news reporter and sub-editor covering science and geopolitics.
Can governments keep their sovereignty without becoming innovation-stifling totalitarians? And on the other hand, are the tech feudalists willing to provide innovative digital infrastructure without eating into state sovereignty and freedoms?
Some of tech's top leaders showed their support for President Donald Trump by donating to and attending his inauguration. Their businesses have now taken a significant hit from Trump's tariff policies. Credit: (Saul Loeb/Kevin Dietsch/Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AFP/Pool/Getty)
When governments find themselves negotiating with tech billionaires rather than their own legislative bodies, you know something fundamental has shifted in the global power structure. It might sound like science fiction, but we’re witnessing the emergence of a new form of governance where traditional nation-states increasingly depend on corporate entities that operate beyond their jurisdictional reach yet control the very infrastructure their societies rely upon.
But in reality, that’s how the modern world operates now. They think “digital dependency” is just another policy challenge, not understanding that they’ve essentially handed over the keys to their sovereignty to entities that answer to shareholders, not citizens. That’s what they fail to grasp.
Digital Feudalism vs Claptrap Sovereignty!
Medieval feudal lords took hereditary control of large swaths of fertile lands and used peasants as workers from whom they would extract rents. While contemporary tech giants took control of the digital space and collected rent from their digital peasants - sorry, “subscribers”- whether through data, subscriptions, or digital monopolies, effectively acting as modern-day “digital” feudal lords.
Tim Cook (Apple), Sam Altman (Open AI), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sundar Pichai (Google), and Elon Musk (Tesla, X) are the feudal lords of this neo-feudalism. These digital barons have created ecosystems where participation isn’t optional, it’s compulsory for economic and social survival. The dependency syndrome manifests in countless ways.
Governments and citizens depend on Amazon Web Services for cloud infrastructure and sensitive data encryption, on Microsoft and Apple for OS software infrastructure, and on Meta et al. for search, listings, and advertising revenue, and for modern-day social connectivity and communication.
When these platforms decide to change their terms of service, entire government operations must adapt. When they experience outages, government services grind to a halt. They are building this dependency while they know the strategic risks that such technological reliance creates, and more importantly, the erosion of democratic accountability that comes when private corporations become essential public utilities without public oversight, and the “digital utility” bills are not even paid to the government.
Talk to me about national sovereignty. A term increasingly becoming a claptrap trope to use on citizens when governments want to push their sentiments towards or against “anything,” nothing more!
Selective Digital Jurisdiction?!
When you observe how these tech giants navigate international law, you begin to see a pattern of jurisdictional shopping that would make medieval merchants envious. They incorporate in tax-friendly jurisdictions, store data in privacy-weak countries, and claim immunity from local laws by pointing to their terms of service agreements. Despite the massive amount of data and sophisticated computing capacity, Big Tech has evolved into the new data sovereigns that governments must accept in the data era.
Governments that once commanded armies and controlled currencies now find themselves supplicants before corporate boards, begging for data access or platform compliance, and even currency supply, hello FED!
The most revealing aspect of this relationship is how governments have internalized their dependency. Rather than challenging the arrangement, they seek to manage it through regulation that often ends up legitimizing corporate power rather than constraining it.
Dependency (Đ) as a Currency!
Governments tend to pool their dependencies instead of breaking free of them. They create continental, multinational, and international frameworks to codify and delegitimize their subservient dependency on tech feudalists.
What makes this approach even more harmful to governments’ sovereignty is that these non-state tech actors not only suffice with selling products or services, they actually lobby to shape government policies, influence public opinion, and even take control of democratic participation by redirecting consensus.
Can you see any elections now that don’t rely on social media platforms? Or intelligence data security that does not use the giants’ cloud computing? Will you be able to receive economic or trading data without their networking infrastructure? If the answers to all of the above are no, then what “sovereignty” or we even talking about?
The revealing nature of this dependency becomes clear when governments find themselves unable to function without these private services. They’ve created a situation where challenging big tech means risking the collapse of their own operations. Basically, what I would suggest is to stop minting the forged currency of “Sovereignty ($)” in the West and start minting the real currency, “Dependency (Đ)”.
The No-Alternatives Power Shift
“Power” as a concept is basically being redefined by non-state creatures that live beyond old-school national and international frameworks. These tech creatures are not bound by any treaties or diplomatic conventions, unlike nation-states, who willingly shackle themselves with them.
These digital feudal creatures enjoy unprecedented flexibility and freedom to teleport operations across jurisdictions, relocate their headquarters, migrate their data centers, and shuffle their corporate hierarchies way quicker than any government can ratify regulatory legislation.
Meanwhile, the few attempts at creating sovereign alternatives reveal the depth of the dependency syndrome. Europe’s digital sovereignty initiatives, China’s tech nationalism, and various national cloud projects all highlight how difficult it becomes to escape the gravitational pull of established platform ecosystems.
The emergence of artificial intelligence adds another dimension to this power shift. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is heavy on AI, including a 10-year moratorium during which any U.S. state or local government cannot regulate AI. This demonstrates how even attempts at governance surrender regulatory authority to corporate actors, creating legal frameworks that protect private interests over public accountability.
Digital Protectionism is a Thing!
Another challenge to the existing order might soon emerge from state-directed alternatives, as countries like China demonstrate that technological sovereignty is possible with sufficient political will and resources. Look at China; they’re extremely focused on data sovereignty. They have clear rules about where data can be collected, stored, and processed, as all of it has to stay in China.
But these types of state policies are usually susceptible to being painted as “authoritarianism” by tech feudalists at every chance. They succeed with their propaganda in defacing sovereign digital protectionism into “governmental authoritarianism” to make it unappealing to so-called democratic societies.
Yet, the question remains valid on both sides. Can governments keep their sovereignty without becoming innovation-stifling totalitarians? And on the other hand, are the tech feudalists willing to provide innovative digital infrastructure without eating into state sovereignty and freedoms?
The Dependency Paradox
Public-private partnerships are increasingly becoming a sought-after approach, as lobbied politicians seek to normalize the increasing dependency and receding sovereignty.
They celebrate when tech companies invest in their jurisdictions, not recognizing that such investments often come with conditions that further entrench dependency. Big Tech does not exercise direct political coercion over workers or users. Instead, it creates an economic ecosystem that compels participation.
This form of control has proven way more effective than old-school coercion, while in reality it still replaces voluntary and publicly debated participation with a monopolistic, no-alternative “public-private partnership”.
They implement policies that primarily serve platform interests, regulate in ways that entrench existing power structures, and compete for the favor of entities that view governmental regulations and national borders as inconvenient obstacles to profit maximization.
Techno-Feudalists vs Digital Sovereigntists
The question will sound weird, but we have to ask it anyway: Who do you think would prevail in this data war, the “techno feudalists” or the “digital sovereigntists”?
The answer to this question will determine whether the 21st century sees the evolution of governance beyond the nation-state model or the devolution of democracy into a managed decline under corporate oversight.
The choice, for now, remains ours, but the window for meaningful action grows narrower with each platform update and each government contract signed with big tech. The infrastructure of freedom cannot be rented indefinitely from those who profit from its restriction.
C. Janith is a Jadetimes news reporter and sub-editor covering science and geopolitics.
The United States is escalating its confrontation with China under the guise of “deterring aggression,” while in reality reorienting its global strategy toward maintaining hegemony over Asia through destabilization, political manipulation, and military buildup.
Photo: (Wikimedia Commons/Asiatimes/Getty)
In late May 2025, US Secretary of Defense (now called the “Secretary of War”) Pete Hegseth warned the world the US was in the process of implementing a division of labor in both Europe and the Middle East while pivoting its attention and all of the interference, instability, conflict, and even war that comes with it toward Asia.
More specifically, Secretary Hegseth stated, “we are reorienting toward deterring aggression by Communist China.”
By “deterring aggression by Communist China,” Secretary Hegseth meant preventing China from defending itself and the stability of the region it is located in from Washington’s attempt to maintain primacy over Asia from the other side of the planet.
Among the manufactured threats Secretary Hegseth cited as justification for US meddling in the Asia-Pacific (referred to as the “Indo-Pacific” by the US government) was China “invading Taiwan.”
Taiwan is recognized both under international law and by the US State Department itself as part of “One China.”
On the US State Department’s official website under, “U.S. Relations With Taiwan,” it states explicitly that, “the United States approach to Taiwan has remained consistent across decades and administrations. The United States has a longstanding one China policy,” and that, “we do not support Taiwan independence.”
In practice, however, the US maintains the political capture of Taiwan’s local administration, arms and politically supports it, while encouraging it to pursue separatism from the rest of China.
This, not “Chinese aggression,” is at the root of US-Chinese tensions, a modern-day continuation of Western colonialism over the Asia-Pacific region spanning generations. China’s growing economic and military power threatens to overturn centuries of Western hegemony.
This is the true “threat” Washington is reacting to – not unwarranted Chinese influence over its own region of the world, but the irreversible end of America’s unwarranted influence over the opposite side of the planet.
Turning Asia Upside Down
Despite hallucinations of a US “retreating” from Asia under the current Trump administration, the US is in the middle of region-wide destabilization carried out by the various tools of US political coercion and capture, namely the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), USAID programs now continuing more quietly under the US State Department itself, and adjacent Western foundations like George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
Much in the same way the US targeted North Africa and the Middle East during the “Arab Spring” in 2011, it is now targeting first Indonesia with deadly riots disrupting the new BRICS member’s participation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting, which took place in early September, then toppling the government of Nepal right on India and China’s borders with equally deadly violence, and more recently targeting both the Philippines and border regions of India with the same “Gen Z” branded unrest.
By doing so, the US is shaping the region as part of a continued effort to encircle, contain, and undermine China itself.
Those married to the illusion of an America “retreating” from Asia have attempted to sell this recent unrest across Asia as “organic” and “spontaneous,” despite extensive evidence of US NED-funded organizations both leading and promoting the protests and an interim government now taking shape in Nepal in which half of the 8 ministers appointed by mid-September are drawn from US NED-funded fronts – many of which these interim ministers actually founded or directed.
These ministers include Om Prakash Aryal, appointed Minister of Home Affairs, who served as a member advocate of the USAID, NED, and Open Society-funded Justice and Rights Institute-Nepal; Jagadish Kharel, appointed Minister of Communications and IT, who founded the USAID-funded Media Help Line organization; Mahabir Pun, appointed Minister of Education, Science, and Technology, who directed the USAID-funded National Innovation Centre; and Prasad Pariyar, appointed Minister of Agriculture, who directed the USAID, NED, CIA-proprietary The Asia Foundation, and Open Society-funded Samata Foundation.
Dr. Sangita Mishra, who has been appointed Minister of Health, previously served as director of the Paropakar Maternity and Women’s Hospital, which regularly took USAID funding, with US Embassy statements mentioning her by name during “hand-over ceremonies.” While this funding could be considered on its own potentially “innocent,” together with overtly US-backed figures being appointed alongside her, indicates an overwhelmingly pro-US (and US-dependent) interim government taking shape in addition to the US-funded organizations that promoted and led the protests themselves.
In the Philippines, protests were led by Tindig Pilipinas, a member of the US NED-funded International Center for Innovation, Transformation and Excellence in Governance (INCITEGov) and promoted by US NED-funded media outlet Rappler, founded and directed by Maria Ressa, who literally has her own webpage on the NED’s official website.
While the current government in the Philippines has been extensively servile to Washington at the expense of the Philippines itself, the unrest could serve as either a means to root out any independent political forces not yet subordinated by the US or as a means of coercing the current government because it has hesitated to fulfill Washington’s increasingly dangerous demands in regard to confronting China.
US interference and the networks it uses to implement it span the entirety of Asia, with additional unrest in other nations across the region all but inevitable.
Continuity of Agenda
Washington’s goal is to surround China with either hostile US-captured client regimes or instability, denying China political, economic, and even potentially military partners.
At the same time, the US continues transforming nations like South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines into militarized battering rams to both provoke China and potentially fight a proxy war against it in the same manner the US is currently using Ukraine and the rest of Europe to fight the Russian Federation.
All of this has taken place through a process spanning the entire 21st century regardless of who sits in the White House or who controls US Congress.
Under the current Trump administration, in the same late-May speech by Secretary Hegseth, he bragged about the development and deployment of US weapon systems specifically designed for conflict with China, including the Navy/Marine Corps Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS), designed for targeting naval vessels, as well as the Typhon missile system, which was previously prohibited under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty President Donald Trump withdrew from during his first term in office.
The systematic unilateral withdrawal from arms control treaties and the subsequent development and deployment of previously prohibited weapons along both Russia and China’s periphery by both the Trump and Biden administrations demonstrate that the US - far from “retreating” - is engaged in a deliberate and methodical escalation toward containment and confrontation with both nations spanning multiple presidential administrations and continuing to this day.
Beyond developing and deploying weapons along China’s periphery, the US is coercing its client states in the region to divert public money away from social programs and infrastructure and toward arms manufacturing and maintenance facilities to sustain US conflict in the region otherwise inhibited by what US policymakers often refer to as the “tyranny of distance” – the reality of the US picking a fight with China on the other side of the planet from where the US and the source of its military industrial production are actually located on a map.
Called the “Partnership for Indo-Pacific Industrial Resilience” (PIPIR), Secretary Hegseth described it as, “a U.S.-initiated multilateral forum of 14 allies and partners working with industry, capital providers, and key non-governmental stakeholders to strengthen industrial resilience, expand our capacity, and accelerate deliveries,” involving aircraft and naval vessel repair facilities, the standardization of drones and input components across the region, and the production of US weapons like the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) used by M270 and HIMARS launch platforms.
PIPIR is meant to exploit US client states in the region to compensate for America’s own military-industrial shortcomings back home, as exposed amid its proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, as much as it is meant to provide logical support for large-scale conflict with China from within the region rather than far beyond it.
Despite some analysts cherry-picking episodes of diplomatic posturing by the Trump administration to portray it in “retreat” from Europe or Asia, the very existence of these ongoing programs demonstrates the US’ desire to continue encircling and encroaching upon China both with continuously expanding US military power and through US political interference and regime change targeting China’s allies and partners.
Secretary Hegseth closed his mid-May speech in Singapore by claiming:
The motto of my first platoon, the first one I led, was: “Those who long for peace must prepare for war.” And that’s exactly what we’re doing. We are preparing for war in order to deter war - to achieve peace through strength. And we look out in this room, and we look to you - to our allies and to our partners - to join us in this important work.
In reality, the US has been in a continuous state of war throughout the 21st century and continues to wage both war and proxy war around the globe today. Secretary Hegseth and the interests he serves are not attempting to “prepare for war in order to deter war” but rather continuing to wage constant war to deter any sort of equitable peace.
Washington’s sustained campaign of political destabilization, military encroachment, and economic warfare across Asia demonstrates a refusal to accept the reality of a sovereign China and a broader rising Asia that seeks to define its own regional destiny free from Western interference. Washington’s true objective is demonstrably not peace, but the continuation of its historically unwarranted dominance, even at the cost of turning the Asia-Pacific region, or even the rest of the world, into spiraling chaos, conflict, and catastrophe.
