Source: BBC News [UK state media]
“An Ecuadorean man, who police accuse of leading a faction of one of the country’s most feared criminal gangs, has been shot dead as he was leaving the airport in Ecuador’s largest city, Guayaquil. Security footage shows two young men waiting outside the arrivals terminal holding stuffed toys and flowers before one of them approaches the victim, pulls his gun from behind a teddy and shoots him point-blank. Police have detained two teenagers in connection with the crime, the latest in a widespread wave of gang violence. … Ecuador’s interior minister, John Reimberg, identified the victim of Wednesday’s attack as 39-year-old Carlos Alberto Suástegui Villanueva, who he said was the leader of the Los Águilas gang in El Triunfo, a region east of Guayaquil.” (06/18/26)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gy2l30dd0o
Source: Reason
by Jesse Walker
“I do not know my favorite Founder’s name. I just know that in 1788 a Baltimore newspaper published a series of pseudonymous essays where he warned against standing armies, called for a bill of rights, and declared, paraphrasing Jonathan Swift, that ‘laws are cobwebs, catching only the flies and letting the wasps escape.’ See-sawing between fears of an aristocratic legislature and a tyrannical executive, he argued that we’d be best off with the highly decentralized democracy found in certain Swiss cantons.” (06/18/26)
https://reason.com/2026/06/18/1776-all-stars-a-farmer/
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“It’s all about the impulse to control. We come into this world boundless and free with eyes full of wonder, but within a few years our minds create and solidify a sense of self around which our mental lives revolve. We do this because we are helpless when we are born, and things happen which are uncomfortable or startling, so we naturally begin seeking out strategies to control what happens to us. Before you know it we’ve got vast spires of psychological architecture within us dedicated to using thought to promote the interests and security of an entirely symbolic me-character that we made up in our minds. And from that point on we are cut off from the Eden of perception.” (06/18/26)
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2026/06/18/humans-create-empires-for-the-same-reason-they-create-egos/
Source: Reuters
“Three Saudi-flagged supertankers with six million barrels of crude onboard sailed through the Strait of Hormuz hours after U.S. President Donald Trump signed a deal with Iran over an end to their war, ship tracking data showed on Thursday. Other tankers showed their positions sailing through the strait on public ship tracking on Thursday after weeks of ships concealing their voyages when crossing through the waterway. The sailings from Saudi ports were the biggest departures through the strait in weeks, according to Reuters analysis of shipping movements. Saudi Arabia has mainly used its Red Sea port terminal of Yanbu to ship out oil due to the conflict which started on February 28 and which has stopped hundreds of millions of barrels of oil from leaving from Gulf producer ports through the Strait of Hormuz.” (06/18/26)
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/three-saudi-flagged-supertankers-sail-through-hormuz-after-iran-deal-signed-data-2026-06-18/
Source: National Review
“The Different Motives to Cure Cancer.” (06/18/26)
https://www.nationalreview.com/podcasts/capital-record/the-different-motives-to-cure-cancer/
Source: Antiwar.com
by Ted Galen Carpenter
“There is an indisputably crucial history of very close relations between Beijing and Pyongyang. In late 1950, PRC forces intervened in the war between communist North Korea and anti-communist South Korea (whose government was massively supported with military personnel and weaponry from the United States and other Western countries). The armistice that ended the fighting in 1953 left the Korean Peninsula split between two intensely hostile countries, with the United States and the PRC firmly backing their respective clients throughout the remainder of the Cold War. Despite that history, the current connection between the two communist states is decidedly more nuanced, ambiguous, and even contentious than the lips and teeth cliché would imply.” (06/18/26)
https://original.antiwar.com/ted_galen_carpenter/2026/06/17/how-stable-is-the-china-north-korea-alliance
Source: The Daily Economy
by Iain Murray
“From semiconductors to artificial intelligence, modern proposals for public ownership risk repeating the mistakes Smith identified 250 years ago.” (06/18/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/america-doesnt-need-a-new-east-india-company/
Source: Fox News
“Two high-stakes Supreme Court battles over President Donald Trump’s authority to remove federal officials could reshape the balance of power in Washington, but legal experts say the justices may draw a sharp line between the cases. At the center of the debate are Slaughter v. Trump, involving the firing of Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, and Trump v. Cook, involving Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. While both cases touch on presidential removal power, legal scholars say the disputes present fundamentally different legal questions. In Slaughter, the administration is directly challenging statutory restrictions on the president’s ability to remove FTC commissioners, arguing that limits on the president’s authority to fire commissioners violate his Article II executive powers. But in Cook, the central question is whether Trump met the Federal Reserve Act’s ‘for cause’ removal requirement.” (06/18/26)
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trumps-firing-power-faces-twin-supreme-court-tests-one-agency-may-get-special-treatment
Source: Garrison Center
by Thomas L Knapp
“Code is speech (as ruled by a US district court and affirmed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Bernstein v. Department of Justice). AI models are code. Therefore, AI models are speech, and the government doesn’t get to control them. Not that the current administration, or any other, or Congress, or the courts, can be counted on to respect the Constitution. The ink wasn’t dry on that document before the American political establishment started ignoring its inconveniences. Which leaves Anthropic and other artificial intelligence firms in a bind. … As a practical matter, if Anthropic et al. want to innovate and compete in a growing market that’s already changing how the world works, they need to get away from the US government, which means getting away from the US.” (06/18/26)
https://thegarrisoncenter.org/archives/20703
Source: Washington Monthly
by David Lingelbach & Valentina Rodríguez Guerra
“Rule by the rich may look inevitable, but history shows it’s not. From ancient Greece to New Deal America to today’s Hungary, democracies have found ways to separate private fortunes from public power.” (06/18/26)
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/06/18/how-to-contain-the-oligarchs/
