Source: American Greatness
by Victor Davis Hanson
“By any measure, California is a failed state, and a national embarrassment. Taxes? It has the highest income and gas taxes in the nation. Roads? A Reason Foundation survey ranks it 49th among the states. Mass flight? Between 250,000 and 350,000 more Californians leave the state than move in each year. Housing, gas, insurance, and electricity prices? The highest in the continental U.S. Illegal aliens, the poor, the homeless, the foreign-born, and welfare recipients? The largest numbers in the U.S. Public K–12 schools? Test scores in the bottom quartile. Poverty? Twenty percent live below the poverty line. So, what happened to the nation’s most richly naturally endowed — and once best governed — state? The Left took total control — after millions of the embattled middle class fled.” (06/16/26)
https://amgreatness.com/2026/06/16/is-california-reaching-critical-mass/
Source: BBC News [UK state media]
“SpaceX has agreed to buy AI coding start-up Cursor for $60bn (£45bn) just days after its bumper initial public offering (IPO). Elon Musk’s rocket company will take over Anysphere, which makes the artificial intelligence coding agent. The move comes after SpaceX joined New York’s tech-focused Nasdaq stock exchange on Friday in the biggest ever listing, valuing it at more than $2tn and raising $85.7bn. … Like OpenAI and Anthropic, Cursor’s technology uses AI to automate the process of writing code, one of the most prominent current uses for artificial intelligence.” (06/16/26)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgd5g7d7gyo
Source: Foreign Policy
by Julian E Zelizer
“Trump’s expansion of executive power would make even Richard Nixon blush.” (06/16/26)
https://archive.is/ib70x
Source: The Daily Economy
by Vincent Geloso
“Economic liberalization has often been assumed to have environmental tradeoffs. But decades of data show the incentives of prosperity and preservation are aligned.” (06/16/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/green-growth-data-show-freeing-economies-doesnt-harm-the-environment/
Source: Seattle Times
“A U.N.-backed court in the Central African Republic on Tuesday opened the trial of former President François Bozizé, who is accused of crimes against humanity for abuses committed by members of his security forces between 2009 and 2013. The trial is the sixth held by the Special Criminal Court, a tribunal created in 2015 with U.N. support to prosecute serious crimes committed during the country’s conflicts. …Prosecutors accuse Bozizé of being responsible as a military commander for crimes committed by members of his presidential guard and other security forces, including ‘murder, enforced disappearance, torture, rape and other inhumane acts.’ Bozizé, 79, is being tried in absentia. He has been living in exile in Guinea-Bissau since 2023, and authorities there have refused to extradite him despite an international arrest warrant issued by the court in 2024.” (06/16/26)
https://archive.is/XYx9N
Source: The Dispatch
“The Trump Administration’s Internal Arguments Over Habeas Corpus.” (06/16/26)
https://thedispatch.com/podcast/advisoryopinions/the-trump-administrations-internal-arguments-over-habeas-corpus/
Source: Antiwar.com
by Michael Holmes
“First published in 1999 and updated in a revised 2006 edition, Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost serves as a stark historical warning at a time when Western politicians and commentators habitually frame global politics as an epic struggle between virtuous democracies and barbarous autocracies. The book shows in forensic detail how one of Europe’s most constitutional monarchies oversaw a regime of forced labor, mutilation, rape, torture and mass death on a scale comparable to the worst atrocities of the twentieth century.” (06/16/26)
https://original.antiwar.com/michael_holmes/2026/06/15/the-kings-rubber-empire-democracy-at-home-terror-in-the-jungle/
Source: Washington Monthly
by Bill Scher
“The American president’s ‘Art of the Deal’ reputation is in tatters. But the Israeli prime minister’s attempt to impose a military solution on the region makes him the war’s biggest loser—and Israel isolated and vulnerable.” (06/16/26)
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/06/16/iran-war-netanyahu-trump-iran-deal/
Source: New York Post
“A Texas man who was in Colombia to adopt a 7-year-old boy was arrested after a huge, angry mob accused him of sexually abusing the child in plain sight on a balcony, according to reports. The 36-year-old suspect was seen holding the boy in front of him on a balcony of a building in an upscale neighborhood in Bogota on Sunday afternoon — and an outraged crowd quickly formed below, according to viral video of the incident shared on social media. ‘He’s abusing the child, let him go!’ shouted the woman recording along with others before the man eventually took the child inside, the dramatic clip shows. The otherwise unidentified suspect was arrested at the scene …. the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare later said there were no physical signs of sexual violence, while stressing that the investigation is ongoing because ‘there are other factors involved in sexual abuse,’ according to Bogota-based newspaper El Espectador.” (06/16/26)
https://nypost.com/2026/06/16/world-news/texan-busted-in-colombia-after-huge-mob-accuses-him-of-sexually-abusing-boy-7-on-a-balcony/
Source: The Dispatch
“State Corporatism on the Rise.” (06/16/26)
https://thedispatch.com/podcast/dispatch-podcast/state-corporatism-on-the-rise/
