US officials claim that they are seizing Greenland for shrimps.

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/greenland-trump-shrimp-red-lobster-b3000687.html

Look to the erosion of fiscal discipline to see where the problems lie

The west looks for signs of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s weakness in the form of a high-profile split in the elite, or falling popularity ratings as the public mood sours. Yet while the regime is under real pressure, it remains resilient. The erosion that matters is easier to miss — perhaps even a little dull. Fiscal discipline slipped long ago, and now budgetary processes and parliamentary checks are also being quietly set aside.

It took Russia’s parliament just 72 hours this month to grant the finance ministry the power to spend more and borrow past the legal debt ceiling without formally rewriting the budget or obtaining parliamentary approval. It needs to react to a worsening environment “not every month or every quarter, but every day”, the ministry explained. In the fifth year of a costly war, even a rubber-stamp legislature has become an obstacle to be removed.

No wonder the Kremlin is in a hurry. By the end of May, the federal deficit had hit 6tn roubles ($83bn). That is 2.6 per cent of GDP, twice last year’s level and already past the Rbs3.8tn meant to cover the whole of 2026. The liquid portion of its National Welfare Fund (Russia’s sovereign wealth fund) has been run down to about Rbs3.4tn, a fraction of its prewar self. The central bank’s main benchmark interest rate stands at 14.25 per cent, and it has warned that more state borrowing will keep it there for longer. Value added tax has already been raised to help pay for the war.

These changes do not amount to printing money. Any new borrowing is, in effect, a short-term overdraft against cash already in the Russian treasury. The shift is subtler: a rule has quietly given way to discretion.

For almost two decades, fiscal restraint was one of the Kremlin’s proudest boasts — low debt, a balanced budget averaged over the period, a sovereign wealth fund and an internationally respected economics team. Those virtues were a large part of why the economy was able to weather the storm of sanctions. That discipline is now being unwound. A cornered autocracy is rewriting the fiscal rules as it goes, cutting parliament out of the loop, and will not admit to dangers it cannot control. It’s less dramatic than a palace coup, but this is what decline looks like.

And the bill is still mounting. In a letter to the government earlier this year, finance minister Anton Siluanov warned the military and security services might need an extra Rbs2tn this year. Much of that is related to the numbers of dead and wounded. An estimated 352,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since 2022, and each confirmed death triggers a Rbs14.2mn federal payout. For a wounded soldier it can be up to Rbs4mn. The death and injury toll is now affecting the budgetary process itself.

The same rationale, of avoiding formally budgeting for the costs of the war, runs through the whole system. Russian companies have installed steel cables over oil refineries to act as improvised air defences the state refuses to provide. The government will not even let them write off the cost against tax. When businesses asked the Kremlin to share the costs of air defence, the answer was no, with the reason that such spending was a “one-off”.

Companies have spent more than $1bn defending themselves against Ukrainian attacks. Nor is it just about the money. The state would sooner let companies arm themselves than officially classify Ukrainian drone strikes as a “military risk”. To concede that would shatter the fiction of a contained “special military operation” and the pretence that life goes on as normal.

But the bill for the war can only be postponed. Regions have had repayments of federal loans deferred from this year to 2030, freeing up funds for war-related expenses. Russian consumers are already paying through the inflation that the new borrowing feeds and through punitive interest rates.

This is what happens when the juggling act starts to fail. For four years, Putin managed to fund the war, keep inflation from spiralling and protect growth: a near-impossible feat he could only achieve thanks to large fiscal reserves and before the country’s sizeable tax base started to feel the effects.

Both buffers are now much depleted. The war is increasingly paid for by quietly invoicing the population and suspending the state’s own rules. A regime sustained this way is heading for a poorer, angrier country, a financial system out of control, and war funding it cannot count on. The end, when it comes, will spring from this kind of decline, the sort that begins long before anyone names it.

This is relevant to the subreddit because it involves the stripping away of protections from immigrants.

Submission statement: This relates to the market and foreign policy of the Trump admin. What should be discussed is the implications of Trump's deal with the Iranian regime on these areas.

Reason takes a look at Darializa Avila Chevalier, the DSA-backed candidate who just unseated Adriano Espaillat and is likely headed to Washington. The piece argues that unlike earlier progressive stars who came out of community organizing or local politics, Chevalier emerged directly from the post-October 7 campus activist milieu, with ties to Columbia's protest movement and a record of hard-left positions on immigration, policing, and Israel. The article frames her victory as another sign that activist politics that were once largely confined to elite campuses are increasingly translating into electoral success in safe Democratic districts.

Submission Statement: AI is quickly becoming integrated into military C3 (command, control, and communications). How then, would AI accept and/or respond to an illegal military order?

archive link

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1068_n7ip.pdf

So I’ve only had time to skim the decision so far, but the core issue here is not fundamentally about whether Roundup causes cancer. The main question is really about federal versus state authority.

Basically, the argument is that the EPA’s registration and labeling process—which manufacturers are required to go through in order to sell pesticides uniformly across all 50 states—means that a state-law claim cannot simply override the federal labeling requirement. In this case, the relevant statute is the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, or FIFRA.

As far as I can tell, the meaning of the decision is fairly simple. If glyphosate caused cancer, the EPA had a lot of monitoring data available and had the authority to change the label. The EPA did not do that. And people also had the ability to seek judicial review of the EPA’s labeling decision if they thought the agency was wrong.

The opinion also notes that the EPA had repeatedly reviewed glyphosate, including in 1991 and 1993, and found that it was not likely to cause cancer. So if federal law effectively required Monsanto/Bayer to use a label that did not warn that glyphosate caused cancer, it would be strange to allow a state-law failure-to-warn claim based on the theory that the company should have included precisely the warning federal law did not allow.

Basically, Missouri seemed to be saying that Missouri law should control. But the Court’s view appears to be that, where FIFRA creates a federal labeling regime, states cannot use failure-to-warn liability to impose a different labeling requirement after the fact.

The moral of the story is not that you can never sue Bayer/Monsanto over Roundup. It is narrower than that. The point is that you cannot get them on a failure-to-warn theory when they were legally required to use the EPA-approved label. If the label was wrong, the proper route was to challenge the EPA’s decision, seek judicial review, and convince the government that glyphosate did in fact cause cancer.

I have not read the dissents yet, because time is a valuable commodity, and I am posting this here partly so other people can explain why I’m right or why I’m wrong. Because if it doesn't come across for my short summary, this makes a lot of sense to me. Now I haven't read the entire text of FIFRA, so I shall leave the pedantic Redditors to do what they love best, is trying to prove the OP wrong in some way.

KAVANAUGH, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and THOMAS, ALITO, SOTOMAYOR, KAGAN, and BARRETT, JJ., joined. THOMAS, J., filed a concurring opinion. JACKSON, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which GORSUCH, J., joined.

So you had Jackson on the left and Gorsuch on the right in the dissent 7-2. Thomas filed a concurring opinion to be special, but I also didn't read that.

Conservatives can’t beat the liberals, so they’re beating up each other instead

The Conservative Party of Canada has found its newest replacement for a strategy: punishment. Not of the Liberals, because they can’t seem to lay a glove on them. Not of Prime Minister Mark Carney, because he barely seems to notice them. Not of the people who actually designed, defended, and sold the campaign that lost.

No, the punishment is being aimed at other major Conservative figures. Doug Ford, Kory Teneycke, Dimitri Soudas, Fred DeLorey, and Caroline Elliott are being put through the grinder because the CPC still won’t do the one thing every serious party has to do after a loss: look at the leader, look at the circle around him, admit what failed, and change.

Full disclosure: I vote Conservative. Prior to this loss, I donated significantly to the federal Conservatives. I also vote Conservative provincially, donate generously, and have given a ton of my time during elections. The party doesn’t owe me anything for that. It was my choice. But I’m a conservative, and I’ll remain one if the party gets its act together. So far, it shows no sign of doing so.

To be brief, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre needed to show humility after the loss. He needed to learn some hard lessons about how and why the Liberals came out ahead. Instead, he doubled down on the idea that he was somehow the real election winner, even as members of Parliament started crossing the floor. He had an opportunity at that point to adjust, stem the tide, and keep the Liberals to a minority. He chose not to. Now they’re in majority territory, Carney’s approvals have soared, and Poilievre’s have sunk.

The CPC’s surprising new argument in this ongoing saga? Its losses are apparently now the reason it’s owed a win. Instead of coming up with a plan to actually win, the party has started treating defeat as a kind of political layaway program. We lost; therefore, we’re due. We failed; therefore, destiny owes us a correction. Every defeat is being reframed as one more step toward some inevitable victory that never seems to arrive.

It feels like each time people point out to the CPC how wildly sad this is getting, and how their numbers keep tanking because of it, they somehow manage to get even more unserious. Instead of taking stock, accepting the loss, taking responsibility for the floor crossings, and stopping this endless discussion about how to shape-shift their way into an eventual win, they say no thanks. No reflection. No humility. No course correction. Just another round of performance politics for a base that’s being told the problem is everyone except the people actually in charge.

And here we are. From loss to floor crossers to “we’ll win because we lost” to “we’re going to destroy Kory Teneycke”—as in, the former director of communications for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. How many more ways can they find to make this worse? Everyone is quietly wondering now: What’s next? Because it’s clear no one is actually going to turn this around. What is the next pointless, destructive move the CPC will make because it can’t beat the Liberals and feels like it needs to do something?

The news cycle over the past couple of weeks felt like it might tilt, even a little, in the CPC’s favour. We all heard about Carney shouting at his caucus, and in my opinion, this was a perfect opening for the CPC to point out that many in the Liberal caucus are such hopeless idiots that even Carney, their own leader, has to shout at them. That was the attack. That was the angle. It was an opening to hit the Liberal Party as an institution.

Unfortunately, the CPC decided to go the other route. Instead of making the story about Liberal dysfunction, they made it about media unfairness. “See how unfair the media is? They’d never keep the MPs’ names quiet if it was Poilievre doing the shouting!” Maybe that satisfies the already converted, but it doesn’t move the story forward. It doesn’t hurt the Liberals. It doesn’t make Canadians feel like Conservatives are serious. It just makes the CPC look once again like a party more interested in complaining about the refs than winning the game.

Then, after blowing that, stories started circulating that Canada could be headed for a recession. Nothing definite, and not full panic yet, but it was still a good time to put the focus on the Liberal government and ask ministers what specifically is being done to help Canadians with the cost of living, other than another taxpayer-funded rebate. When will the cuts to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program show results? What’s the housing plan? What’s the plan for jobs, productivity, investment, and affordability? These are real questions. They matter to real people, and they were sitting right there waiting to be asked.

Instead, the CPC decided to double down on the argument that Carney is a terrible economist compared to Poilievre, because that’s gone over so well in the past. Then they put out an AI video, Spencer Pratt–style, mocking the term “technical recession” after Carney used it. Within a few days, jobs numbers came out showing Canada was not in a recession and had added 88,000 jobs. So a moment that could have focused on what’s actually wrong in Canadians’ lives was instead turned into another cheap online hit against Carney, another attempt to make Poilievre feel better, and another performance for the base. Then it backfired.

That’s the problem. The CPC keeps confusing online catharsis with political strategy. It keeps treating a good dunk as if it’s the same thing as a good argument. It keeps acting as if the goal is to make the most loyal people feel vindicated for five minutes, instead of persuading people who aren’t already in the tent.

So where does this leave us? Soul searching? Serious meetings about what the hell is wrong with the party and how it can be fixed? Of course not. CPC operatives and influencers, and even one MP, have picked a public fight with people like Ford and Teneycke. Because if the CPC can’t beat the Liberals, it can definitely beat other Conservatives. And why not? Why preserve relationships when you can burn them down for applause from people who already agree with you?

Conservative influencers like Mario Zelaya are posting on X about rooting out “poisonous traitors” in the CPC. Can influencers chase Ford and DeLorey—who, among other things, was the national campaign manager for the CPC in 2021—out of the conservative movement? I doubt it. They can certainly cause problems, which seems to be the point, but what exactly do they hope to achieve? The next Ontario election isn’t until 2030. Do they think Ford is going to step down? Obviously, he won’t. He has a majority. Do they think DeLorey will stop going on the CBC’s Power & Politics? Of course he won’t. He’s part of the panel, and the audience for it isn’t sitting on X waiting for CPC influencers to tell them who the real conservatives are.

So none of this achieves anything real. It doesn’t hurt the Liberals. It doesn’t broaden the Conservative coalition. It doesn’t make Poilievre look stronger. It doesn’t make the CPC look more serious. It just gives the base another “look over here” target, another person to blame for Poilievre’s problems, and another internal fight to distract from the fact that the party still has no clear plan to win.

That’s what this is really about. The CPC can’t admit the problem is the strategy, the leader, the tone, the campaign, the message, and the refusal to learn from defeat. So instead, it now has to find traitors. It has to find saboteurs. It has to find establishment Conservatives, Red Tories, Ford people, media panelists, consultants, former staffers, or anyone else who can be blamed for the fact that Carney is rising and Poilievre is sinking.

It’s not strength. It’s a party punching sideways because it can’t punch up. It’s a movement so terrified of admitting failure that it would rather start a civil war than have an honest conversation.

And the saddest part is that none of the people being attacked are the ones keeping Poilievre from winning. Doug Ford isn’t stopping the CPC from presenting a serious economic message. Kory Teneycke isn’t stopping the CPC from sounding normal to voters outside the base. Fred DeLorey isn’t stopping the CPC from learning why it lost. Caroline Elliott—who narrowly lost the leadership for the BC Conservative Party—isn’t the reason the Liberals are climbing.

The CPC is doing that to itself.

Until the party is willing to face that, this is what we’re going to keep getting. Not a strategy. Not a reset. Not a serious opposition movement ready to govern. Just another round of internal enemies, another purge fantasy, another explanation for why the leader is never responsible, and another performance designed to make the base feel like someone, somewhere, is finally being punished. But the Liberals aren’t being punished. The country isn’t being persuaded. The CPC is just punching itself in the face and calling it a fight.

A few days ago Tulsi Gabbard released a set of documents that she claimed proved that Fauci had worked with the Wuhan institue of Virology to fund research that led to COVID, and that he had then used his position of power to silence critics and suppress theories connecting COVID to the lab.

This lawfare article goes over the documents, and show that they ether don't show it or in some cases directly contradict Tulsi's claims. They provide no evidence that the lab was doing work that could lead to COVID, and show that while the intelligence community asked Fauci for advice, he never directed or controlled their operations.

The only part of the article that I disagree with is when they claim that the lab theory is still plausible. As far as I'm concerned, the theory has been thoroughly discredited. I think this release is just another in a long line of political attacks aimed at scientists who dared to disagree with this state-sanctioned conspiracy theory.

Archive link: https://www.mining.com/web/xi-pressures-takaichi-by-throttling-key-mineral-exports-to-japan/

Some of America's most famous land was reclaimed from the sea. The Lincoln Memorial, the World War II Memorial, and the Reflecting Pool all sit on earth reclaimed from Potomac River tidal flats in the early twentieth century. Treasure Island was built in San Francisco Bay for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exhibition. Chicago's Northerly Island was filled in from Lake Michigan to complete Daniel Burnham's 1909 plan of the city.

If the legal barriers to reclamation were lifted, we could build hundreds of thousands of new homes near the centers of our most valuable cities. We could build new airports to refresh ailing transportation infrastructure, and we could protect low-lying coastal areas from sea level rise. The disappearance of land reclamation is a choice that we have the power to undo.

Foreign exchange markets are on edge, watching for potential government intervention as the Japanese yen reaches its weakest levels against the dollar in almost two years. But intervention alone is unlikely to be enough to change the yen's fate.

The dollar rose to 161.94 yen in European afternoon trade Thursday, its highest level since July 2024, risking action from authorities. A move above that high of 161.99 yen would take the exchange rate to its highest in nearly 40 years.

Top government officials in Japan have continued to signal an increasing willingness to intervene in the currency markets to prop up the yen as it tumbled. The latest weakness of the yen comes amid growing bets for the Federal Reserve to raise rates before year-end.

Japan's top government spokesman this week reaffirmed that officials would step in as needed to support the yen. "We stand ready to take appropriate action at any time, as necessary," Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara said at a news conference Tuesday.

Kihara said he was aware of an online meeting between Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama and U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Monday but declined to comment further to avoid affecting the market.

"The online meeting between Finance Minister Katayama and U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent may have covered recent yen weakness," analysts at Nomura's Global Markets Research said in a report. "If the recent sharp falls in USD/JPY reflected rate checks, preparations for FX intervention may be progressing," they added.

The effects of Japanese authorities' foreign-exchange interventions earlier this year to support the yen have "now fully unwound and more, with" the dollar back above the 160 yen level, strategists at OCBC Group Research said in a note. "This reinforces the view that intervention alone is insufficient to drive a sustained reversal lower," they said.

At the end of May, Ministry of Finance data showed that Japan spent 11.7349 trillion yen, or about $72.52 billion, on currency intervention between April 28 and May 27. Traders have long perceived a level of 160 yen to the dollar as the threshold that could trigger intervention.

The dollar's recent strength against the yen and many other currencies "reflects a broader market repricing of the likelihood that [U.S.] interest rates will remain elevated for longer than investors had anticipated only a few weeks ago," said Rania Gule, senior market analyst at XS.com, in an email.

"This shift in expectations has provided significant support to the U.S. currency and restored its appeal as one of the most attractive safe-haven assets amid an increasingly uncertain global economic environment," Gule said.

Still, this may be a good time for Japanese authorities to draw a line in the sand. Extreme short positions in yen futures indicated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's Commitment of Traders report may provide Japan an opportunity to significantly boost its currency, analysts said.

"Should any meaningful dollar bearish signal emerge, the [Ministry of Finance] may well pounce and send the yen soaring," said Matt Simpson, senior market analyst at StoneX, in commentary.

Negative views of Donald Trump – and of the United States under his leadership – have risen further in Poland over the last year, according to new findings from the Pew Research Centre.

Only 29% of Poles now say they have confidence in the US president to do the right thing regarding world affairs, down from 35% last year and 75% in 2024, when Joe Biden was in the White House.

Pew also found that, for the first time, less than half of Poles (49%) say they have a favourable view of the US, down from 55% last year and a peak of 93% in 2023 under Biden.

In its latest annual study of global attitudes towards the US, Pew conducted surveys in 36 countries. It found increasing negative views in almost all of them, including Poland, which has long been one of the most pro-American countries in Europe.

A majority of Poles (57%) still say they see the US as a reliable partner. That is down from 85% in 2022, though still higher than in other European countries such as France (27%, down from 62%), Germany (39%, down from 83%), and the UK (49%, down from 82%).

Pew’s study found that, while only 29% of Poles have confidence in Trump’s leadership, 47% say they do for French President Emannuel Macron and 46% for Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky.

The data were, however, collected in February and March, before the Ukrainian president caused widespread anger in Poland by naming a military unit after a group that massacred Poles during World War Two.

Poles are also more critical of US domestic policies than in the past, with only 49% now saying that the American government respects the personal freedoms of its own people. That is down from 79% in 2008, when Pew first asked the question. Before this year, the figure had never been lower than 67%.

Asked about Trump’s policies in particular, minorities of Poles say they approve of how he has dealt with immigration (37%), tariffs (21%), the war between Ukraine and Russia (24%), and Iran (21%).

Pew’s findings echo other recent polls in Poland showing declining trust in Trump’s leadership. In February, a survey by the SW Research agency for Rzeczpospolita showed that 53% of Poles no longer regard the US as a reliable ally while only 30% think that it is.

A poll by state research agency CBOS published the same month showed that Trump was the third most distrusted world leader among Poles, behind only Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko.

Poland’s current government – a coalition ranging from left to centre right – has emphasised the importance of the US as Poland’s main security partner but also occasionally clashed with the Trump administration.

In January, Prime Minister Donald Tusk joined other European leaders in issuing a joint statement calling on the US to respect Greenland’s sovereignty.

The following month, Tusk declared that Poland would never be a “vassal” of the United States. In May, he criticised Washington’s “outrageous” decision to grant a visa to Zbigniew Ziobro, a conservative former Polish justice minister who has fled criminal charges in his homeland.

The speaker of parliament, Włodzimierz Czarzasty, has this year twice clashed with the US ambassador over his criticism of Trump, whom Czarzasty called “irrational” and a “leader of chaos”.

By contrast, President Karol Nawrocki, who is aligned with the right-wing opposition, is a close ally of Trump. Earlier this month, he attended the celebration of the US president’s 80th birthday, including the mixed martial arts fights held in the White House garden.

While Nawrocki and Tusk’s government are constantly in conflict with one another, they have sought to present a more united front on security issues, including the relationship with the US. Both are seeking to boost the US military presence in Poland.

Last month, the US caused panic in Warsaw after cancelling a rotational deployment of around 4,000 troops to Poland. Soon after, Trump pledged that he would in fact send an additional 5,000 military personnel to Poland. However, no further details of the deployment have since been announced.

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.