The price spike the day before the tax cut is a legitimate thing to be furious about - that behavior is genuinely predatory. What’s getting less attention is that Germany is simultaneously one of five countries pushing the EU for a windfall tax targeting exactly that. Whether it’ll be fast enough or strong enough is a fair debate. But ‘bumbling’ and ‘deliberately doing nothing’ are different problems.

The judge ruled that the MSNBC pundit was using hyperbole when he said Patel has “been visible at nightclubs” far more than at the FBI building.Kash Patel filed a $250 million lawsuit against The Atlantic, he has lost a different A day after FBI Director defamation claim, against news analyst and pundit Frank Figliuzzi.

U.S. District Judge George Hanks Jr. dismissed Patel’s lawsuit against Figliuzzi, former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI, who has been an analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.

…

”Hanks wrote, “A person of reasonable intelligence and learning would not have taken his statement literally: that Dir. Patel has actually spent more hours physically in a nightclub than he has spent physically in his office building. By saying that Patel spent ‘far more’ time at nightclubs than his office, Figliuzzi delivered his answer ‘in an exaggerated, provocative and amusing way,’ employing rhetorical hyperbole.”The judge wrote that because he found that the statement was “rhetorical hyperbole,” it cannot be considered defamation.

According to Nilsson, the real inflation rate in Russia is closer to the key interest rate of 15% than to the Russian Central Bank’s official estimate of 5.86%."

The Russian economy can only go on one of two scenarios: long-term recession or shock," Nilsson said. “In either case, it will continue on a downward trajectory towards financial disaster.”

Long read here, but the story illustrates how the city attorney was scrambling less just to convict her than preempt a lawsuit she’s likely to file against the city. Doesn’t directly answer your question, but the context makes this clear that there were some desperation moves here.

Fase 1: Alertering (Alert)

• The DG KenE decides on scaling up, and the Departementaal Adviesteam Olie is established to closely monitor the situation.
• The NCC (National Crisis Centre) is involved.
• Deployment of strategic reserves is possible if called for by the EU or IEA.
• Sectoral measure groups are activated to prepare advice on possible interventions per escalation phase.
• Monitoring and public communication are scaled up.

https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/binaries/rijksoverheid/documenten/rapporten/2023/02/03/bijlage-landelijk-crisisplan-olie/landelijk-crisisplan-olie.pdf

Germany’s Merz recently said that his country has different needs in that matter than France, which needs the jet to be able to carry its nukes and land on an aircraft carrier. Germany’s air force, on the other hand, would like the fighter to focus more on range.

A possible solution could be to develop two separate planes and continue to develop the other elements of the project together with the third partner, Spain.

You need to work on your searchfu, and dig more into your source credibility. At least until CNN newsroom is gutted by the WB takeover, they still have a fairly high factuality standard, if slightly progressive (American not European) bias.

Not all sat imagery is showing it as it’s new and imagery is expensive, so something like Apple maps, Yandex, and others aren’t updated enough. However google earth is and if you go straight to NASA Sentinel 2 shows it as of March 24.

https://www.google.com/maps/@46.878574,16.877323,17z/data=!3m1!1e3

https://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/unfinished-roundabout/view/google/

https://eos.com/landviewer/?lat=46.878574&lng=16.877323&z=16.0&id=S2A_tile_20260324_33TXN_0&b=Red%2CGreen%2CBlue&anti=true&processing=L2A

Those two resignations in quick succession Monday night amounted to a stunning flurry of accountability, and a sudden turn in a months-long saga for the Texas Republican. Though Gonzales had faced calls from his own party leadership to abandon his reelection bid, he had until Monday been able to remain in his job.

House GOP leaders knew they couldn’t afford to lose his vote and had privately acknowledged that losing him would hurt their voting margin, making it much harder to accomplish Trump’s agenda. (Johnson has not been in favor of expelling members in the past, which he has said required a complete investigation by the House Ethics Committee.)But the calculation inside the GOP began to change as Democrats appeared increasingly likely to back expulsion for their own member, Swalwell, as he faced allegations of sexual misconduct, including from a former aide.

Many of the most vocal lawmakers — including Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, who had notably called to expel Gonzales even though it would hurt the GOP’s margins — are also involved in Congress’ ongoing investigation into how the federal government mishandled the investigation into serial abuser Jeffrey Epstein.

The dramatic push for resignations marked a stunning moment on Capitol Hill.

So now Hungary deals with a potentially less mafia like leader, who still isn’t very pro EU nor Ukraine and might still bloc the 90 Billion Euro. However he’ll have his own mess to clean up and possibly stop blocking the EU from more functionally operating as well as hopefully stop being a Putin conduit/advocate.

Trump and the US shit is world affecting, but get your head out of your US ass. The EU is where the free world game is, and China is still the player to watch. Trump just made the US more irrelevant and your ignorance is part of why that is.

Ah, yes the idiots they found.

And here in lies one of the many problems with American exceptionalism. “It’s always from our perspective.”

As an American abroad, I have to say I really dislike the ignorance from where I was born.

In that, I congratulated you on your very Dutch directness in querying.

The president did not share any names as to the leaker, the journalists, or the media outlets that he believed had publicized the story. But after his comments, some members of the press pointed toward Fox News and The Washington Post for being among the first to land the scoop.

Yet those media companies were not the only ones to report that one member of the military had been unaccounted for after the initial rescue on Friday: Reuters also reported at the time that just one of the aircrew had been rescued. Hours later, the outlet reported that a search and rescue was underway.

Other journalists jumped to claim the scoop, even after Trump’s threat. Amit Segal—an Israeli journalist with ties to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—said on his Telegram chat later Monday that he was the first to report the story.

“As you may recall, this was first published here,” Segal wrote.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former staunch ally turned Trump critic, said everyone in the Trump administration who claims to be a Christian needs to “beg forgiveness from God” and intervene in the president’s “madness”.

In a lengthy post on X, the former Republican congresswoman wrote: “I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit. I’m not defending Iran but let’s be honest about all of this.”

She went on: “The Strait is closed because the US and Israel started the unprovoked war against Iran based on the same nuclear lies they’ve been telling for decades, that any moment Iran would develop a nuclear weapon.”

You know who has nuclear weapons? Israel. They are more than capable of defending themselves without the US having to fight their wars, kill innocent people and children, and pay for it. Trump threatening to bomb power plants and bridges hurts the Iranian people, the very people Trump claimed he was freeing."

You it’s a Mad Easter when MGT is the voice of reason you are applauding, even if she is nucking futz.

So that’s rumors of Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, and now Gabbard. I doubt any changes will help Trump improve his ability to control reality… But I also doubt it until I see anyone dismissed.

This is the author’s post at Oxford: https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/news/global-poverty-trends-through-a-new-lens-olivier-sterck-article-for-voxdev

Has global poverty fallen since 1990? Depending on which poverty line you use, the answer ranges from “we’ve made huge progress” to “nothing has changed”.

Using the World Bank’s extreme poverty line of US$2.15/day (in 2017 PPP), the share of people in poverty fell from 38% of the world’s population in 1990 (about 2 billion people) to 8.5% in 2024 (690 million people) (Figure 1). This is often cited as a historic success.

But raise the line – say to $21.5/day, as suggested by Pritchett and Viarengo (2025), or $30/day, as argued by Roser (2024) – and the picture changes entirely. The poverty rate is then extremely high, above 75%, and has barely budged since 1990. In absolute terms, the poverty headcount has even increased, from over 4 billion poor people in 1990 to over 6 billion poor people in 2024. Based on these numbers, the fight against global poverty appears to have failed.

This divergence is not just a statistical quirk. All mainstream poverty measures share the same fundamental feature: they ignore everyone above the chosen line. With the extreme poverty line of the World Bank ($2.15/day), someone earning $2.16/day is treated as equally non-poor as someone earning $10, $100, or $1,000/day. Billions of low-income people – who most would agree still live in poverty – are therefore excluded from the statistics. And because there is no consensus on where to set the line, it is tempting to pick the one that tells the story you want.

In Sterck (2026), I propose to measure income poverty without a poverty line. The idea is to measure poverty across the entire income distribution, rather than classifying people as poor or non-poor based on an arbitrary threshold.

The measure’s key intuition is simple: if person A earns half as much as person B, then A is twice as poor. Poverty is therefore simply measured as the reciprocal of income, and its unit is simply inverted. If incomes are measured in dollars per day ($/day), poverty is measured in days per dollar (days/$).

Average poverty is simply the average time it takes to earn $1 in a given population.

In 2024, that value was equivalent to:

• 1 day in DR Congo, Madagascar, South Sudan, and Mozambique
• 12 hours in Haiti
• 2 hours in China
• 85 minutes in the US
• 25 minutes in Switzerland.

3:31 seconds in is when she say it.

Satisfying, but verse others who believe in this it’s still disheartening.

While I understand the hypothesis, I am not sure it is working out that way.

Although Trump is trying desperately to find a way to subvert the elections, given the decentralized State based nature of it, it’s going to take more than an external war with Iran to justify an internal canceling of the elections. The SAVE Act is an attempt at nationalizing the Elections, but while it’s moving it lacks the capacity to jump the biggest hurdle in the Senate. Any Executive attempt at nationalizing the elections has very little judicial basis, which would make it hard to hold up in court. It’s dynamic and complex, but it’s not as simple as his declaration of marshal law.

That is not to say your sentiment isn’t correct. If he can find a way, or his backers can find a way, they will try and do it.

On the second point, Trump didn’t get a 9/11 style bump. Indeed it seems to have gone almost the opposite way based on polling. Given inflation and other economic impacts, it might cause more defections before it helps him.

What it has done is push Epstein out of the US new. This too might have been part of the calculus. It is still rippling through the UK and other political systems, but the US has put it aside for now.

You are correct, but that won’t stop them from trying to blame them.

Also the Dems are so ineffectual lately, they might just make it easy for him.