“Far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has announced a major expansion of illegal [squats] in the occupied West Bank, as he pushes to annex more of the Palestinian territory. Smotrich said on Wednesday that a planning committee had approved the construction of 2,162 new Jewish homes, of which 1,006 units will be in a new illegal [squat] near Jerusalem, 922 near the city of Nablus and 234 near Hebron.” (06/04/26)
“Impeachment has become more common in American politics in recent years. Democrats impeached Donald Trump twice in his first term. The Senate failed to convict him both times. Yet the power remains poorly understood despite its rising prominence in political discourse. Keith E. Whittington’s new book aims to fix that.” (06/04/26)
“Police have arrested a 36-year-old Mountain View woman in connection with a fire at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in Carmel Valley earlier this year. Announced Tuesday by the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office, the arrest comes after an investigation that revealed GuoGuo Lu was allegedly making online statements tied to the fire and threats toward other Buddhist temples in the state. The fire happened on March 27 at the oldest Japanese Buddhist Soto Zen monastery in the country, officials said. The sheriff’s office said Lu is facing several charges, including arson, making criminal threats and committing a felony hate crime.” (06/03/26)
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Joseph Solis-Mullen
“Famed for his contributions to the hard sciences—most notably his theory of heliocentricity—the sixteenth-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was also an acute analyst of monetary policy. To that end, Ralph Benko has done us all a great service with this new edition of Copernicus’s classic, if neglected, treatise On the Minting of Money. Indeed, its lessons, though nearly five centuries old, remain evergreen.” (06/04/26)
“Homer is back in the discourse on account of Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film, The Odyssey. The latest controversy began with Elon Musk, among others, protesting the supposed inaccuracy of casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen, a fictional character, who among other fantastic elements is the daughter of the god Zeus and was laid as an egg by her human mother. … the fight over Homer represents just another skirmish in the campaign mounted by bigoted very-online right-wing self-described ‘chuds’ to claim Greek and Roman culture for their own fascist, or at least fascist-adjacent, ideology, which demands the exclusion of minorities, women, and LGBTQ people.” (06/04/26)
“The oil industry is warning the Trump administration that a Hormuz-sized hole in the world’s petroleum market is steadily draining inventories to levels that are likely to send global energy prices surging in the next several weeks, according to four executives. Industry executives have flagged the issue to senior White House officials and Cabinet members in recent weeks as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing dialogue with the U.S. energy industry, the people said. The warnings came as recently as late last month as data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration and other sources began showing that fuel makers were increasingly relying on oil and fuel from their storage tanks to replace products no longer arriving from the Middle East.” (06/04/260
“Robby Soave gives his radar on the recent anniversary of a tweet from NPR about public health experts signing a letter that supported the anti-racism protests during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.” (06/04/26)
