Source: NBC News
“A Russian drone crashed into an apartment building in Romania early Friday, injuring two people and setting the building ablaze, exactly the type of spillover from the war in Ukraine that many in Europe have long feared. It was one of 232 drones and one ballistic missile launched by Russia against neighboring Ukraine, authorities there said, the latest nearly nightly attack against Ukraine’s power grid. An unknown number of these drones crossed over into Romanian airspace, its government said. ‘This incident represents a serious and irresponsible escalation by the Russian Federation,’ Romanian Foreign Affairs Minister Oana-Silvia Țoiu said in a statement, promising to respond …” (05/29/26)
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/ukraine/russian-drone-hits-romania-apartment-block-nato-ukraine-rcna347495
Source: Foreign Policy
by Stephen M Walt
“Once a deal is reached, the Trump administration will apply buckets of lipstick to this pig and insist that it is some sort of strategic victory. Few observers will be convinced, however, and such efforts will just make the president and his coterie of sycophantic advisors look silly. There’s just no credible way to spin this debacle as a success. The more they try to do so, the more delusional they’ll appear. That got me thinking: What if Trump just admitted that he’d made a mistake?” (05/28/26)
https://archive.is/m4gdv
Source: Reason
“Early man discovers fire, bureaucracy.” (05/28/26)
https://reason.com/video/2026/05/28/caveman-bureaucrat/
Source: CBS News
“A powerful New Glenn rocket owned by Jeff Bezos'[s] Blue Origin exploded in a spectacular fireball Thursday, sending billowing clouds of fire, smoke and flaming debris into the night sky in a tremendous conflagration visible for miles around. The explosion occurred around 9 p.m. EDT as engineers were counting down to a brief test firing of the New Glenn’s seven methane-fueled BE-4 first stage engines at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Blue Origin was gearing up for a June launch to put a batch of Amazon ‘Leo’ internet satellites into orbit. … The U.S. Space Force Eastern Range, which coordinates all launches from Florida, said in a statement that ’emergency responders are on the scene. All personnel have been accounted for and there were no injuries/fatalities.'” (05/29/26)
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/blue-origin-new-glenn-rocket-explodes-launchpad-florida/
Source: Garrison Center
by Thomas L Knapp
“Yes, data centers use a lot of water. Yes, data centers use a lot of electricity. But the builders of those data centers are constantly working to reduce water and electrical requirements because supplying those requirements is costly. Unless there’s some really bizarre change to the historical arc of invention and innovation, we are at the peak, not the low point, of data center resource usage.” (05/28/26)
https://thegarrisoncenter.org/archives/20635
Source: CNN
“The US and Iran reached a tentative agreement to open the Strait of Hormuz and start nuclear talks, according to US officials — though President Donald Trump has not signed off on it yet. Iranian officials have not yet commented on a potential deal. US Vice President JD Vance said ‘a couple of language points’ are still under discussion but the sides are making progress in peace talks. Sources say the tentative deal would begin 60 more days of negotiation on Tehran’s nuclear program.” (05/29/26)
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/28/world/live-news/iran-war-us-news
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“Libertarians differ from left liberals, including Abundance liberals, in their view of rights, positive or negative, but I want to argue policy instead. Most libertarians accept the existence of a government that provides courts, law enforcement, and national defense and collects taxes to pay for them. The policy difference between the generic libertarian and the generic left liberal is what the latter adds to that: a welfare state and government regulation of the economy viewed as a correction to market failures and to the failure of individuals to correctly see their own interest and act on it.” (05/28/26)
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/libertarians-and-abundance-liberals
Source: CNN
“President Donald Trump has refiled his lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal’s publisher and two of its reporters over a July 2025 report on a lewd birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein bearing Trump’s name. Tuesday’s defamation lawsuit seeks $10 billion for damages and claims that the story had ‘glaring failures in journalistic ethics and standards of accurate reporting.’ … The president’s earlier lawsuit was dismissed last month, with a federal judge ruling that Trump failed to plausibly allege the newspaper acted with ‘actual malice’ when it reported the story. … The Wall Street Journal story published in July 2025 was about a collection of letters gifted to Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003. One of the letters, the Wall Street Journal reported, bore Trump’s name and an outline of a naked woman. Trump has denied writing the letter.” (05/28/26)
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/28/politics/trump-refiles-lawsuit-wall-street-journal-epstein
Source: Independent Institute
by Ivan Eland
“The United States loves to remember the Second World War and the Gulf War, because they resulted in the United States smashing the huge conventional armies of diabolical adversaries such as Adolf Hitler, the Imperial Japanese, and the former American ally Saddam Hussein. Yet most recent U.S. wars haven’t gone all that well. Although the outcome of the Korean War against countries using conventional armies — North Korea and China — didn’t provide the expected decisive victory over adversaries, the real trouble started in Vietnam, when such opponents began to realize that the center of gravity when fighting the United States abroad was really at home in the United States.” (05/28/26)
https://www.independent.org/article/2026/05/28/is-the-u-s-capable-of-being-cautious-about-foreign-interventions/
Source: Reuters
“The number of Americans filing claims for unemployment benefits increased marginally last week amid relatively low layoffs, despite the dragging war with Iran. Initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 5,000 to a seasonally adjusted 215,000 for the week ended May 23, the Labor Department said on Thursday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 211,000 claims for the latest week. Claims have been tucked in a 190,000-230,000 range this year. … The unemployment rate is expected to have held steady at 4.3% in May. Continuing claims have dropped from last year’s lofty levels, though some of the decline is likely due to people exhausting their eligibility for benefits, limited to 26 weeks in most states.” (05/28/26)
https://www.reuters.com/business/us-weekly-jobless-claims-increase-marginally-amid-low-layoffs-2026-05-28/
