“The Dynamic Has Shifted”: Global Automakers Now Bet Heavily On China For Global Expansion Strategies Foreign automakers are rushing to debut China-developed models at a major auto show, recognizing they can’t afford to lose ground in the world’s largest car market, according to Nikkei. After years of declining sales, many legacy brands are shifting to an “in China, for global” strategy—using local innovation not just to […]

US Has No Plan To Renew Iranian, Russian Oil Waivers, Bessent Says Authored by Kimberley Hayek via The Epoch Times, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on April 24 that the United States will not renew the sanctions waivers that enabled buyers to take delivery of Iranian and Russian crude already loaded on tankers at sea. Bessent said a one-time license covering Iranian oil on the water would not be extended, calling it […]

Where Does Eastern Europe Begin And End? Key Takeaways There is no single definition of Eastern Europe. Its borders vary depending on historical, political, and cultural context. Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus are almost always included, forming the region’s “core.” The eastern boundary is widely agreed upon, but the western edge shifts significantly across definitions. The maps below use data from various organizations to […]

Reset Germany: Breaking With An Exhausted Ruling Class Authored by Frank-Christian Hansel via American Greatness, Germany is not, in the first place, suffering from an economic crisis, an energy crisis, a migration crisis, or a crisis of state. Germany is suffering, chiefly, from a crisis of its elites. More precisely, Germany is suffering from a crisis brought on by that milieu which regards itself as the country’s morally, […]

Hayek, Orwell, And ‘The End Of Truth’ Authored by Jonathan Miltimore via Civitas Institute, In 1942, after fighting in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1937), a disillusioned writer returned to London to write about his experience. It wasn’t just that the fascists in Spain had won and his side—a small, anti-Stalinist Marxist group—had lost. What frightened him was the ease with which truth itself had been erased and replaced by […]

Compute Costs More Than Talent In AI For leading AI companies, the biggest expense is not talent. It is compute. This chart from Visual Capitalist’s AI Week, sponsored by Terzo, uses Epoch AI data to compare spending at Anthropic, Minimax, and Z.ai across R&D compute, inference compute, and staff plus other costs. In every case, compute accounts for the majority of total spending, underscoring how capital-intensive it […]

Charlottesville: The Deceit Underlying The Hoax Authored by Steve Cortes via RealClearPolitics.com, For years, Democratic politicians and their allies in the legacy media have spread the damnable Charlottesville Hoax: the propaganda myth that President Trump praised bigots who rioted in 2017 in the Virginia town. Of course, the opposite is true, as Trump actually said: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white […]

Futures Jump To Record High After Report Iran Offered New Non-Starter Proposal To Reopen Strait Update (10:30pm): Just when it seemed that the market may have its first red Monday in a while – and the semiconductor bubble may actually have a down day after a ridiculous 18 day streak higher – the Trump-Axios plunge protection team struck again, and courtesy of Axios’ in-house market levitator, Barak Ravid, whose specialty is creating […]

California’s Billionaire Tax Proposal Has ‘Slippery Slope’ Lever California’s latest effort to tax its richest residents into leaving is barreling toward the ballot – only this time, it’s got a built-in ‘slippery slope’ lever once voters hand them the keys. Backers of the proposed “billionaire tax” say they have already cleared the first hurdle, gathering more than enough signatures (at least 1.5 million) to qualify a […]

SBA Sends 562k Pandemic Loans To Bessent For Collections Totaling $22 Billion The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) has announced a sweeping enforcement action targeting suspected pandemic-era loan fraud, referring more than 562,000 borrowers tied to $22.2 billion in delinquent loans to the U.S. Department of the Treasury for collection, according to the Small Business Association. The move marks the largest referral package […]

The Reality Behind US-Iran Negotiations Authored by Bryan Brulotte via The Epoch Times, The current negotiations between the United States and Iran are being misread as a chaotic exercise in brinkmanship. They are not. They are the predictable endgame of a contest in which leverage has shifted decisively, and in which one side is now negotiating under constraints it can no longer escape. Strip away the theatrics, and the picture […]

Ilhan Omar Probe Expands Into Hubby’s $30M Of Shady Biz Deals In Kenya, Dubai And Somalia House Oversight Chairman James Comer is cranking the investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett, into overdrive – demanding a full accounting of shadowy international business trips and deals that stretch from the Horn of Africa straight into Kenya, Somalia and the glittering skyscrapers of Dubai. Omar has been making strange […]

Maine Governor Vetos Data Center Moratorium, Citing Job Creation And Economic Growth Maine Governor Janet Mills has vetoed a bill that would have temporarily limited the development of large data centers across Maine, despite expressing support for a broader pause on such projects, according to Maine’s website. The governor said she would have approved the legislation if it had included an exemption for a $550 million data center […]

Bessent Defends US Dollar Swap Lines As UAE Considers Formal Funding Request Several Gulf countries have discussed receiving dollar swap lines from the US, the WSJ reported last week. In the near term, there is an economic drag if volumes of oil and gas sales have fallen by more than the price effect can offset, or where tourist and business travel has dried up. The effect is similar to that of the pandemic: slowing growth and […]

“The National Security Premium”: US Plan To Counter China In Critical Miners Could Drive Up Global Prices The US is pressing its allies to rethink how they source essential minerals, urging them to accept higher prices if it means reducing reliance on China, which currently dominates much of the global supply, according to a new report from Financial Times. According to US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, countries working with […]

WHCA Shooter’s Tweets Found, Suggesting Radicalization Fueled By Democratic Messaging Update:  Shooter’s archived tweets emerge  Shooter’s Manifesto explained about Trump admin target kill list. He wrote, “prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest” …  Shooter’s intent was to Target Trump & admin officials  Shooter donated to “Harris for President” via ActBlue  Shooter apprehended and taken into […]

War Schmwar By Peter Tchir of Academy Securities Markets have been almost totally dismissive of the conflict in Iran. Frankly, the number of countries, including oil-rich nations, that had been firing at each other seemed quite high, yet most markets shrugged it off. While the Strait remained closed, or blockaded, or blocked, the market remained in Open Sesame mode this week. Moonshot Artemis II wasn’t the only “moonshot” […]

Ford Denies Talks With Geely About Bringing Chinese Car Tech To U.S. On Friday, a report crossed the wire that Ford and Geely had been in discussions about collaborating more closely, including whether their developing European partnership could expand into the U.S. market, according to the Wall Street Journal.  Ford denied the claims, which stated that one idea involved Ford using Geely’s vehicle technology domestically. The […]

Will the Left Make The WHCA Dinner Shooter A Hero? There was a lot of confusion in the initial hours after the shooting at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night. But it soon became clear that the suspect, Cole Allen, a 31-year-old teacher from Torrance, California, had rabid anti-Trump views and was there to target Trump administration officials.  While the usual suspects on […]

‘Gender Identity’ Requirements Will Be Discarded In Housing Programs: HUD Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner announced a new proposed rule on Thursday that seeks to end the use of “gender identity” across all departmental programs, which is intended to “restore biological reality and protect women.” Housing and Urban […]

Is Anthropic Coming For eBay? Late Friday afternoon, as most people were checking out for the weekend after nearly two months of U.S.-Iran war fatigue, Anthropic quietly released a note titled “Project Deal.” The company built a closed marketplace where AI agents negotiated prices, struck deals, and completed real transactions with money changing hands. “We created a marketplace for employees in our San Francisco office, with […]

ICE Nabs Illegal Alien Pedophile In Virginia; Sanctuary Officials Ignored Detainer Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news, ICE has arrested an illegal alien child sex predator in Abigail Spanberger’s Virginia. Authorities there tried to protect him by declining an ICE detainer last year and releasing him back into the community. Of course they did. The suspect, Roni Mendez-Escobar, a Guatemalan national, faced charges […]

You Can Buy A Tennessee Cave And Turn It Into A Doomsday Bunker About 57 miles southeast of downtown Nashville, as the crow flies, an underground cavern system listed on Zillow is being framed as a potential candidate for the ultimate nuclear doomsday bunker. Think of the cavern as the shell for a future bunker. To get it anywhere close to true bunker status, millions of dollars in engineering, ventilation, power, water, […]

Mamdani Is Destroying The Tax Base His Stupid Ideas Desperately Need Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance  When the Fischer-Price My First Mayor™ of New York Zohran Mamdani chose to film a “tax the rich” video in front of a Manhattan penthouse owned by Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, he wasn’t just celebrating “tax day”, he was making a policy argument. Mamdani was making a choice about his tone (dickish), about targets […]

“A Societal Loss Of Humanity”: Older Men Are Falling In Love With A Deluge Of AI Generated Female Influencers Older men are being scammed and fooled left and right by a deluge of AI generated female influencers, according the NY Post. What appears to be a growing wave of glamorous influencers online isn’t always what it seems. In some cases, these personalities are entirely artificial – carefully engineered digital figures […]