“Employees at the Louvre Museum voted to extend a strike that has disrupted operations at the world’s most visited museum, though the attraction partially opened Wednesday to allow visitors to enjoy the ‘Mona Lisa’ and other highlights. The museum said that visitors have started entering the building, where they had access to a limited ‘masterpiece route’ which includes Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’ and the famous Venus de Milo. … Union workers are protesting chronic understaffing, building deterioration and recent management decisions — pressures intensified by a brazen crown jewels heist in October.” (12/17/25)
Source: The American Conservative
by Eldar Mamedov
“When NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte warns, as he did last week, that the alliance must prepare ‘for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured,’ he is not merely outlining a defense posture. He intends to commit more American blood and treasure, backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. taxpayer, for an endless war in Europe against Russia. But Rutte could, ultimately, help bring about the opposite: an American backlash to NATO that sees a reduction of U.S. commitment to the Western alliance.” (12/17/25)
“When it comes to the Ukraine war, there have long been two realities. One is propagated by former Biden administration officials in speeches and media interviews, in which Russian President Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion had nothing to do with NATO’s U.S.-led expansion into the now shattered country, there was nothing that could have been done to prevent what was an inevitable imperialist land-grab, and that negotiations once the war started to try to end the killing were not only impossible, but morally wrong. Then there is the other, polar opposite reality that occasionally slips through when officials think few people are listening, and which was recently summed up by former Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Europe at the National Security Council Amanda Sloat, in an interview with Russian pranksters whom she believed were aides to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.” (12/17/25)
“During President Trump’s first term, the economy was a relative strength of his. During the 2024 presidential campaign, his promises to lower prices in a country grappling with post-COVID inflation propelled him back into office. But toward the end of his first year in office this term, just 36% of Americans approve of his handling of the economy, according to the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll. It’s his worst mark in the six years that Marist has been asking the question. The only time in that span that Americans had a similarly negative view of a president’s handling of the economy in the poll was in February 2022, when Joe Biden was president.” (12/17/25)
“There are lots of historical precedents for large numbers of multigenerational non-citizens in a country. None of them are attractive examples to follow. There were the Jews in ancient Egypt, the Huns and the Vandals in the Roman Empire, Irish Catholics under penal laws of English occupation from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, and more recently black tribes in apartheid South Africa. Sure, most of those empires continued on the maps for centuries afterwards, but they all endured massive civil discord and violent revolts as a result of the arrangement. And yet, among the Republican right, there’s a crusade against birthright citizenship enshrined in the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment …. Jettisoning birthright citizenship would create the same kind of large permanent underclass that caused the violent chaos in the aforementioned empires above.” (12/17/25)
“A hundred deaths, a thousand deaths, quickly turn into ‘collateral damage.’ But the killing of two desperate men, clinging to the wreckage of their boat in the Caribbean – their boat that has just been bombed – rips open the abstraction of military public relations. They’re just ordinary human beings – like you, like me, like our parents and our children – rather than … uh, narco-terrorists. And suddenly this new war the Trump administration has launched is more than just a videogame. Hey, Pete, this is not keeping us safe! Indeed, as I write these words, I picture the so-called Secretary of War clinging to the wreckage himself. Perhaps he’ll eventually realize that war always comes home, that what we do has consequences, that creating peace is a bit more complex than killing the bad guy (and thus preventing him from contradicting the official narrative).” (12/17/25)
“The European Commission unveiled a plan on Tuesday to drop the EU’s effective ban on new combustion-engine cars from 2035 after pressure from the region’s auto sector, marking the bloc’s biggest retreat from its green policies in recent years. The move, which still needs approval from EU governments and the European Parliament, would allow continued sales of some non-electric vehicles. Carmakers in regional industrial powerhouse Germany and in Italy had sought easing of the rules. The EU executive appears to have bowed to calls from carmakers to keep selling plug-in hybrids and range extenders that burn fuel as they struggle to compete against Tesla and Chinese electric vehicle makers.” (12/16/25)
