Source: Financial Times [UK]
“Liechtenstein has launched an emergency task force to tackle a crisis of ‘zombie’ trusts, which has left hundreds of entities linked to wealthy Russians in legal paralysis. The tiny Alpine principality, a hub for thousands of trusts and foundations, has been hit by a wave of resignations by fiduciary and board directors in the past six months as its regulatory system adjusted to US sanctions packages against Russia. The result could leave as many as 800 orphaned entities — legally recognised but functionally frozen — with nobody in charge to manage assets or oversee liquidation. Bankers and lawyers have warned the crisis risks contagion into the country’s broader financial sector, including major banks, if the government does not address the problem.” (07/07/25)
https://archive.is/ZZsgB
Source: EconTalk
“What Is Capitalism? (with Mike Munger).” (07/07/25)
https://www.econtalk.org/what-is-capitalism-with-mike-munger/
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Mark Episkopos
“To a considerable degree, President Donald Trump won the presidency in 2024 because voters embraced his message of keeping America out of protracted conflicts and his promise to end the war in Ukraine. The administration has made substantial operational headway, particularly in reopening stable channels for dialogue with Russia, but it has proven difficult to arrive at a framework for a negotiated settlement that enjoys buy-in from all the stakeholders — Ukraine, Russia, and Europe. A sharp diversion of American resources and attention to the Middle-East threatens to make the goal of facilitating a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine more evasive still.” (07/07/25)
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/iran-strikes-russia/
Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob
“The world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived! Maybe, just sometimes, we let fools dig themselves deeper into their folly. Take New Yorkers. The city’s government has been dysfunctional for ages. But now it’s potentially taking the starkest left turn yet, towards … communism. Mayoral candidate Rep. Zorhan Mamdani may call himself a ‘democratic socialist’ and quote Martin Luther King piously, but he also admits that seizing the means of production is the ultimate goal … just not politically acceptable.” (07/07/25)
https://thisiscommonsense.org/2025/07/07/vote-communist/
Source: The American Prospect
by Ryan Cooper & David Dayen
“Well, everyone, it’s official. Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Act passed the House last Thursday afternoon and was signed into law on the Fourth of July. You’ll likely be able to celebrate with a local hospital closure of your very own, very soon — or, if you live in Red Willow County in southwest Nebraska, which voted for Trump 84-15, right now. For obvious reasons, the enormous cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in the bill, along with the permanent extension of the Trump tax cuts tilted mostly to the wealthy, got the most attention. But this thing is stuffed to its back teeth with provisions, almost all horrible, and many of them downright weird.” (07/07/25)
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-07-07-ten-bizarre-things-hidden-in-trumps-big-beautiful-bill/
Source: CNN
“President Donald Trump has threatened new tariffs on [American buyers of goods from] any nation supporting ‘anti-American’ policies of the BRICS group of emerging economies, as he announced tariff letters would be sent out to scores of countries from Monday, ahead of a key deadline. In a Truth Social post on Sunday, Trump said the US would impose an additional 10% tariff on [American buyers of goods from] ‘any country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS’ with ‘no exceptions,’ though it was not immediately clear which policies Trump was referring to. The BRICS group, an acronym of founding members Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, has long stood as a disparate body of countries united by a shared view that global power-sharing should be redistributed to reflect current global economic realities for a ‘multipolar’ as opposed to a West-led world order.” (07/07/25)
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/06/business/bessent-tariff-deadline-trump
Source: Antiwar.com
“Israel Wants US Side Deal on Gaza Truce, IDF Kills 288 in Gaza Over Three Days, and More.” (07/07/25)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHT2CMY0Irg
Source: Law & Liberty
by Josh Appel
“Conservatives are not used to winning. Decades of cultural marginalization and political frustration have conditioned the American Right to define itself by resistance. But now, after a sweeping political victory, many on the Right seem unsure what victory is for. This is a lesson the Left once failed to learn, and it’s one the Right risks forgetting in turn. What happens when your side actually wins? And what happens when you don’t know how to stop fighting? We’ve seen this before in American politics.” (07/07/25)
https://lawliberty.org/what-to-do-when-you-win/
Source: SFGate
“Submerged in about 40 meters (44 yards) of water off Scotland’s coast, a turbine has been spinning for more than six years to harness the power of ocean tides for electricity — a durability mark that demonstrates the technology’s commercial viability. Keeping a large, or grid-scale, turbine in place in the harsh sea environment that long is a record that helps pave the way for bigger tidal energy farms and makes it far more appealing to investors, according to the trade association Ocean Energy Europe. Tidal energy projects would be prohibitively expensive if the turbines had to be taken out of the water for maintenance every couple of years. Tidal energy technologies are still in the early days of their commercial development, but their potential for generating clean energy is big.” (07/07/25)
https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/underwater-turbine-spinning-for-6-years-off-20759290.php
Source: Antiwar.com
by Tina Antonis
“In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Steve Bannon declared China to be Donald Trump’s ‘real threat,’ invoking what he called the ‘Edwardian view of geopolitics as a ‘world island,’ in which the power that dominates Eurasia controls the globe.’ It’s a telling phrase – one that reaches back to the early 20th-century British imperial imagination, and more specifically, to Halford Mackinder’s 1904 essay The Geographical Pivot of History. Writing at the height of the Edwardian era, Mackinder argued that control over the Eurasian ‘Heartland’ would determine global supremacy. His dictum was blunt: ‘Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.’ This worldview didn’t fade with the British Empire.” (07/07/25)
https://original.antiwar.com/t-m-antonis/2025/07/06/board-games-and-bottlenecks/
