“The leaders [sic] of Britain, Germany and France said on Sunday they supported a proposal for talks between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Russian President Vladimir Putin to try to secure a ceasefire, and Europe would play a role. … Zelenskiy said in a post on X that he also told Starmer Ukraine needed more missiles for air defence systems, just days after he published an open letter to Putin proposing face-to-face talks about ending the war, now in its fifth year. Zelenskiy’s proposal was rebuffed by the Russian president.” (06/07/26)
“The noose tightens. Not with a bang, but with a thousand small cuts—social credit scores, ISP blacklists, library book bans, and the quiet revocation of property rights on devices you thought you owned. The technocratic state doesn’t need to kick down your door. It just needs you to keep renting your knowledge, your books, and your attention from its approved vendors. That’s where these reviews come in. I’ve tested two open source tools that let you opt out of the surveillance economy and build your own infrastructure. One is a terabyte-sized fire hose of offline knowledg — Wikipedia, Khan Academy, medical references, maps, and optional local AI. The other is a quiet, essential tool for anyone who remembers when buying a book actually meant owning it. Neither requires a subscription. Neither phones home. Neither asks permission.” (06/07/26)
“The Los Angeles U.S. attorney’s office said it has opened ‘multiple election fraud investigations,’ claiming the California election system has ‘serious structural vulnerabilities.’ First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, whose office is also attempting to audit the state voter rolls, confirmed the investigation late Friday and vowed to follow the evidence where it leads. The nature and status of the probes federal prosecutors might be pursuing in California was not immediately clear. Essayli did not elaborate on the nature of the investigations he said he’d launched and did not refer to any evidence suggesting that fraud had occurred.” (06/06/26)
“There is a line in the Fourth Amendment that was supposed to settle this. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrant shall issue but upon probable cause. It is not a suggestion. It does not contain an exception for emergencies, for terrorism, for immigration, or for your own good. It was written by men who had watched a government treat a population as a thing to be catalogued, and who meant to draw a line that no administration could cross no matter how frightened the public could be made to feel. That line is being erased right now, not by a vote and not by an amendment, but by a software contract. And the man holding the pen spent his academic career studying exactly how this happens.” (06/05/26)
“Drugmaker Eli Lilly presented trial results to medical professionals on Saturday showing its next-generation obesity drug retatrutide curbed sleep apnea severity in addition to boosting weight loss and helping knee pain. In a Phase 3 trial, Lilly found a weekly injection of retatrutide reduced moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnea severity by 60.6% in adults with obesity. Lilly’s older drug Zepbound is approved for the condition. In the same trial, the drug reduced knee osteoarthritis pain by up to 73.1%, Lilly found. The results were presented at an American Diabetes Association conference in New Orleans.” (06/06/26)
“Lindsey Granger gives her lens on President Trump being dealt several blows this week, including from a judge who said it must remove Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center, and from the House which passed a War Powers resolution.” (06/05/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Vladyslav Manzyuk
“A state works when its formal institutions align with and reinforce the informal order beneath it. It fails when it overrides that order. Yugoslavia assembled populations whose informal institutions — Austro-Hungarian civil law in Slovenia and Croatia, historically distinct legal traditions further east, shaped by Ottoman frameworks, distinct religious frameworks governing commercial obligation — had long created high transaction costs across the same lines the state tried to erase. Iraq assembled three distinct Ottoman administrative provinces. Borders do not erase gradients. These are not failures of tolerance or political will — and it is worth noting that no amount of well-intentioned, constitution-drafting has ever repealed an institutional gradient. They are the predictable outcome of a constructed order imposed on an incompatible spontaneous one, which pushes back through informal markets, parallel institutions, and eventually political fragmentation.” (06/06/26)
“The price that the U.S. government has to pay to borrow money for 30 years has already punched through 5 percent a year, its highest level since the financial crisis of 2007. For 10-year money, the annual price is 4.6 percent and climbing. Amid all the noise about the rise of artificial intelligence and the booming space economy, something far more significant is happening in the financial markets. The cost of borrowing is being reset. And that raises some intriguing questions. Could the politics of deficit reduction stage a comeback? And are voters in any mood to pay attention if it does?” (06/05/26)
“A New York attorney intervened to stop what could have been the largest courtroom judgment in bitcoin in history, filing an amicus brief that persuaded a judge to freeze proceedings targeting nearly 40,000 dormant wallets collectively holding an estimated 3.8 million BTC. The legal battle is unfolding alongside a wave of onchain activity from some of bitcoin’s oldest addresses. On June 6, 2026, Galaxy Research flagged a transaction involving 47.26 BTC, worth approximately $2.88 million, moving out of a wallet that had been untouched since June 17, 2011, a dormancy period of more than 15 years. … Each of these movements chips away at the central premise of the lawsuit: that these wallets were abandoned.” (06/06/26) https://news.bitcoin.com/ny-court-pauses-default-judgment-after-lawyer-argues-39069-bitcoin-wallets-were-not-abandoned/
