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James Eagle: The world is rearming for a more dangerous age

The peace dividend is over. After decades in which military budgets looked like yesterday’s problem, governments are again treating defence as a core economic priority. The IMF says conflicts have risen sharply over the past 15 years, while about half of countries increased military budgets between 2020 and 2024.

The striking detail is not just higher spending, but the speed of the reversal. By 2024, nearly 40% of countries were spending more than 2% of GDP on defence, up from 27% in 2018. SIPRI also found that global military expenditure hit $2.43 trillion in 2023, its steepest annual rise since 2009.

That creates a hard fiscal trade off. Rearmament may be necessary, but it competes with ageing populations, debt costs, climate adaptation and public services. The new geopolitical era is not just more dangerous. It is more expensive.
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Yaroslav Trofimov @ WSJ: Putin’s Strongman Image Is Fading as Ukraine Brings War Home to Russia

Russian president’s ‘Victory Day’ cult backfires as conflict drags on longer than Soviet battle against Nazis

Ever since coming to power more than a quarter-century ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin has built a state religion around May 9, the anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany and the holiest day in the Russian calendar.

AP: Russia to hold a Victory Day parade without military equipment for the 1st time in nearly 2 decades

Irina Tsukerman @ Small Wars Journal: How America’s Adversaries Learned to Weaponize Reality

…
Who is actually winning the wars in Ukraine and Iran, and what would victory even look like if neither battlefield momentum nor economic punishment produces political collapse? How much territory would Ukraine have to recover before Russia could be said to have lost? How much damage would Iran have to suffer before its regional position is truly weakened? If both regimes continue to function, mobilize support, and persuade their populations that the struggle remains necessary, then the more uncomfortable question will begin to surface: whether the real contest has already shifted away from terrain and toward something far less visible but ultimately more decisive.

Wars today increasingly turn on whether governments can control how reality itself is interpreted. …
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James Eagle: TSMC is turning AI demand into monopoly economics

TSMC’s first quarter was not just strong. It was a reminder that the AI boom is being monetised first by the companies that make the physical bottlenecks. …

The remarkable part is the margin structure. …

The risk is geopolitical as much as financial. TSMC is no longer merely a supplier to Apple, Nvidia and AMD. It is infrastructure for the AI economy. That makes its profits extraordinary, but also makes its concentration in Taiwan impossible to ignore.

Alexander Hanff: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.

Lance Whitney@ ZDNET: Why Chrome may have quietly downloaded a 4GB file to your PC – and how to get rid of it

Alastair Marsh, Brody Ford @ Bloomberg: Microsoft Reconsiders Clean-Energy Pledge Made Harder by AI

The tech giant may drop one of the industry’s most ambitious climate targets

Hadas Gold @ CNN: Microsoft, Google and xAI will let the government test their AI models before launch

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Paul Krugman: Trump Is Losing a Second War

The Iran debacle is accelerating the shift away from fossil fuels

Last month, out of more than 11,000 new passenger vehicles registered in Norway, only around 150 had internal consumption engines. The rest were fully electric. In mainland Europe as a whole, EV sales are up 51 percent from a year ago.

The global energy transition — the shift from fossil fuels to electrotech, which uses solar, wind and batteries to power an electrified economy — is accelerating. It’s now clear that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz marks an inflection point: the global green energy curve, which was already on a rapidly rising trajectory, has suddenly become even steeper. “Investors,” reports the Financial Times, “are piling into clean energy funds.”

This acceleration isn’t just a consequence of soaring fossil fuel prices. It is also the result of the worldwide realization that, with the end of Pax Americana, depending on imported hydrocarbons is a risk not worth taking. …

Howard Yu: Western automakers just destroyed 73 billion dollars in EV writedowns this year

…
Western governments pushed automakers toward electrification. Companies committed 330 billion dollars in EV investments between 2021 and 2024. Then the policy reversed. The 7,500 dollar tax credit was killed. CAFE standards were gutted. So automakers went back to gas trucks.

And now every canceled EV program in Detroit is a market BYD walks into unopposed. BYD exported 120,000 vehicles in March alone, up 65 percent year over year. It just raised its 2026 export target to 1.5 million units. A BYD dealership in Manila booked a month’s worth of orders in just two weeks.

Hans Christensen: Yerevan Summit

James Eagle: Africa is being left behind in the electricity race

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Thom Hartmann: Trump Is Making Khrushchev’s “We Will Bury You” Real for Putin. Why?

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Putin called Trump last Wednesday and they talked for almost two hours; fewer than three days later, America announced we’re pulling 5,000 US troops out of the NATO forces in Germany, accomplishing a 60-year-long Russian goal. Trump also ended sanctions on Russian oil, handing the Putin regime billions in revenue, while continuing to block US weapons delivery to Ukraine.

Meanwhile, …

This list is an operational blueprint, the kind of document a hostile foreign intelligence service might draw up if it had been handed unlimited access to the executive branch and told to dismantle the American republic from inside without firing a single shot:

• Hollow out the public health system so disease can do its work,
• Demoralize the officer corps and burn through munitions in unconstitutional wars,
• Terminate the diplomats and intelligence professionals who keep allies aligned,
• Replace independent journalism with state propaganda at Voice of America,
• Defund the agencies Congress created,
• Abandon the clean energy transition that would have weakened OPEC and Russia simultaneously,
• Politicize the FBI and DOJ so they target dissenters instead of crooks, and
• Turn armed, masked ICE thugs loose to terrorize immigrant communities while training the rest of us to accept anonymous federal agents disappearing our neighbors into massive concentration camps.

Every line item that would appear on such a plan has been checked off in the last 14 months, executed by a cabinet of grifters, ideologues, and 13 billionaires whose loyalty runs to Trump and the morbidly rich rather than to the nation whose Constitution they swore an oath to defend.
(Thom Hartmann more…)

WSJ: How to Make Vladimir Putin’s Year

Germany’s Merz was insulting, but that’s no reason for Trump to undermine NATO.

Dariia Mykhailenko @ United24: Putin Retreats to Bunkers as Coup Fears and Drone Threats Shake Moscow

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Priyanka Shankar
@ Al Jazeera:
What’s Iran’s 14-point proposal to end the war? And will Trump accept it?

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The new proposal calls for guarantees against future attacks, a withdrawal of US forces from around Iran, the release of frozen Iranian assets worth billions of dollars and the lifting of sanctions, war reparations, ending all hostilities, including in Lebanon, and “a new mechanism for the Strait of Hormuz”.
…

Tehran also wants its right to uranium enrichment guaranteed as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), but Trump has made the nuclear issue a “red line”. Iran wants decades of sanctions, which have devastated its economy, to be lifted as part of any deal. The navigation through the strait and demands for war reparations are other sticking points in the talks.
…

Musgrave said on the two biggest issues – enrichment of uranium and transferring its highly enriched uranium – the US and Iran remain “far apart”.

“President Trump has been unyielding that Iran must surrender its nuclear capability,” he said.

Kenneth Katzman, a senior fellow at New York-based nonprofit Soufan Center, said Iran’s mistrust of Trump remains a bigger obstacle.

Jaroslav Lukiv, Bernd Debusmann Jr @ BBC: Iran says US has responded to its latest peace proposal

Daniel Dale @ CNN: Fact check: Trump denied he made this remark about Iran. He made it on camera one day earlier

… a reporter reminded Trump that he had said the previous night that the US might be better off not making a deal with Iran.

Mary Geddry: Schrödinger’s War Comes Due

Trump’s Iran conflict is somehow over, ongoing, not responsible, and wildly expensive, while the bill shows up in polling, prices, supply chains, the Pentagon, and everyone’s grocery cart.
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Karen Attiah: America is giving dying mall vibes

On the dangers of social and political nostalgia.
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Many times, we have to fight nostalgia in order to pursue justice. It’s worth overcoming our wistful memories of bopping to Diddy in the 90s so that we can hold him accountable for terrorizing the women in his life. We are already seeing White Political Nostalgia play out in our politics. The roll-back of affirmative action, the purging of Black voices from education and journalism, and now the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act are all fueled by white nostalgia for an America where Black people were kept from power and authority. It is nostalgia for a time when the only socially permissible roles for Black people in America were under the foot of White people. While billionaires outsource jobs overseas, or to AI, white people are being sold the idea that they can return to power, to a carefree time with more opportunities, as long as they get rid of the Blacks and immigrants first.
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Shane Shifflett, Hannah Critchfield @ WSJ: ‘We Know You Live Right Here’: No Secrets in America’s New Surveillance Dragnet

Technical wizardry used to combat illegal immigration also funnels the personal data and whereabouts of U.S. citizens to federal agents

Liz McLellan spent a morning in January witnessing the work of federal agents who had arrived in Maine to pursue the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

Like other community activists, protesters and passersby around the U.S., McLellan took photos, including of an arrest. Then she followed a federal officer driving an unmarked vehicle to see where the agent was headed next.

McLellan was surprised when the agent led her to her own house and blocked her driveway. Other federal officers quickly arrived, boxing in her car with their own vehicles.

“This is a warning,” an agent told her, according to court records and a video recording. “We know you live right here.”

Cindy Cohn @ MIT Press: The Whistleblower Who Uncovered the NSA’s ‘Big Brother Machine’

Alex Braithwaite, Rachel D. Van Nostrand @ Conversation: When immigration detention becomes a system of concentration: Lessons from research on 150 historical cases

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Harriet Torry @ WSJ: AI Investment Boosted Economic Growth, While Consumers Tapped the Brakes

GDP grew at a 2% rate in the first quarter, improving after shutdown-induced slowdown

U.S. economic growth picked up in the first quarter as businesses invested heavily in artificial intelligence, rebounding from a fourth quarter dented by a government shutdown.

At the same time, the economy didn’t expand as fast as economists expected, weighed down by softer consumer spending growth.

Paul Krugman: The Logic of NACHO

On Wall Street, TACO — Trump Always Chickens Out — has abruptly been replaced as a favorite meme by NACHO — Not a Chance Hormuz Opens. As a result, oil futures have soared.

Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – April 30, 2026

Today G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers noted that Trump has hit a new low in overall job performance and in his handling of the economy, at -22.2 and -40.3, respectively. Those numbers reflect the percentage of people who approve of his handling of an issue minus those who disapprove. Indeed, Morris noted that Trump’s approval rating on the economy is so low it “literally broke the scale of this graph on my data portal.”
…

The upcoming elections are definitely on Trump’s mind. He called in to NewsMax today, saying: “It is a problem I’m not on the ballot. And I have to convince—Everyone says if I was on the ballot we’d win in a landslide. I have the best, I have some of the best poll numbers I’ve ever had.”
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Naomi RaineyandEmer Moreau @ BBC: Oil price jumps to $115 after reports of ‘extended’ Iran blockade

Oil prices have climbed sharply following reports that the US is preparing for an ‘extended’ blockade of Iran.

Brent crude rose to around $115 (£85) a barrel on Wednesday, having closed at just over $110 (£81) on Tuesday evening. The price had fallen slightly to $114.37 (£84.68) just before midday BST.

It follows reports from the Wall Street Journal that US President Donald Trump has instructed aides to prepare to extend obstruction of Iran’s ports, in an effort to squeeze the country’s economy.

Iran has said it will continue to disrupt traffic travelling through the Strait of Hormuz in response to the US blockade.

Al Jazeera: Trump vows to maintain Iran blockade, Tehran threatens ‘practical’ action

US president says Washington’s naval siege on Iranian ports is ‘more effective than the bombing’ as oil price soars.

Lucian K. Truscott IV: Trump has ideas about how to end the Iran war. You won’t believe what they are.

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