Source: Sky News [UK]
“All three people who died in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon were television journalists, it has been confirmed. The Lebanese trio were travelling in a car when they were killed on Saturday. Fatima Ftouni, an Al Mayadeen reporter, and Ali Shoaib, an Al Manar correspondent, were among those who died. It has emerged the third person killed was Ms Ftouni’s brother, cameraman Mohammed Ftouni. Fatima Ftouni had done a live report from southern Lebanon just before the strike in the Jezzine region. … Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun said the attack on the journalists was a war crime. … The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) described the bombing as a ‘targeted strike’ and claimed that Ali Shoaib was ‘a terrorist in the intelligence unit of Hezbollah’s Radwan Force.’ It added: ‘Additionally, the terrorist engaged in incitement against IDF troops and Israeli civilians, using his position as a channel to disseminate Hezbollah propaganda materials.'” (03/28/26)
https://news.sky.com/story/three-lebanese-journalists-killed-in-israeli-airstrike-on-car-13525607
Source: Brownstone Institute
by Renaud Beauchard
“What is the information state? It is a regime that governs not through legislature or courts or votes, but through the invisible digital architecture that now mediates nearly every dimension of public life. Siegel’s definition is evolutive: ‘a state organized on the principle that it exists to protect the sovereign rights of individuals’ is replaced by ‘a digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms.’ … Its goal, Siegel insists, was never simply to censor, never merely to oppress. It was to rule. The kind of brazen censorship we observed during the Biden era and that is so tempting to our warring rulers again is not a bug; it is a feature of the new normal.” (03/28/26)
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-digital-leviathan/
Source: Reuters
“Russia’s Baltic Ust-Luga port, one of its largest petroleum export hubs, was damaged again on Sunday by a Ukrainian drone attack which sparked a blaze later brought under control, Russian officials said. It followed several Ukrainian drone strikes last week on Russia’s western energy corridor when facilities at the ports of Ust-Luga and Primorsk came under fire, igniting storage tanks and forcing a suspension of oil and oil product loadings. … The port, operated by Russian oil pipeline monopoly Transneft handles around 700,000 barrels per day of oil exports, and, according to sources, shipped 32.9 million metric tons of oil products in 2025.” (03/29/26)
https://www.reuters.com/world/russias-ust-luga-port-damaged-by-ukrainian-drones-fire-breaks-out-2026-03-29/
Source: spiked
by Frank Furedi
“I have little sympathy for the multibillion-dollar tech companies, Meta and Google, which were this week forced to pay out a combined $6million in damages to a 20-year-old woman. But I have even less sympathy for the notion of ‘social-media addiction’ that led to this extraordinary payout. … The real issue raised by this case is the aversion to responsibility that now prevails in the West. This is aided by the commanding influence of the narrative of ‘addiction.’ We live in a world where bad habits, as they used to be called, have been rebranded, medicalised and diagnosed as addictions. … The flourishing of the addiction industry is partly driven by individuals’ demand to be relieved of responsibility for their bad behaviour. It is also fuelled by the Therapy Industrial Complex, which aims to turn people into vulnerable patients.” (03/28/26)
https://archive.is/RA9aP
Source: Real Clear Politics
by Steve Cortes
“As the world understandably focuses on the Middle East, the Russia-Ukraine war shifts to a fulcrum moment. This new juncture provides President Trump with an opportunity to prove that he is still, indeed, a president for peace. He can reaffirm to his base, and to the world, that he is the negotiator-in-chief who brokers diplomatic solutions across the globe, including the historic Abraham Accords. Regarding the Trump base, polling shows that only 38% of Republican voters now believe that the war vs. Iran will conclude in the days or weeks to come. Moreover, 37% of GOP voters oppose any ground troops in Iran. So, opportunity beckons in the Black Sea region. In a recent breakout interview by the Associated Press of General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the former top military commander of Ukraine, provides startling revelations regarding his battles with Zelensky – and the relevance for the future of postwar Ukraine.” (03/28/26)
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2026/03/28/as_war_rages_vs_iran_time_for_peace_in_ukraine_153993.html
Source: Al Jazeera [Qatari state media]
“For the second year in a row, United States Vice President JD Vance has topped the straw poll at the 2026 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), one of the biggest right-wing gatherings in the country. The poll is a bellwether – albeit, not necessarily an accurate one – for who might ultimately become the Republican nominee for the next presidential race. … The results were revealed on stage Saturday. Vance had swept up 53 percent of the votes cast by nearly 1,600 attendees. But rising up the ranks was another senior official under US President Donald Trump: his top diplomat, Secretary of State Marco Rubio. A former senator from Florida, Rubio notched 35 percent of the vote. It was a markedly improved standing for Rubio, who tied for fourth place at last year’s CPAC straw poll.” (03/28/26)
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/28/vice-president-jd-vance-tops-cpacs-straw-poll-to-be-us-president-in-2028
Source: Yascha Mounk
“David Autor on the Scars That Money Can’t Heal.” (03/28/26)
https://writing.yaschamounk.com/p/david-autor
Source: The Intercept
by Mathew Rodriguez
“Shortly after Trump deployed ICE agents to airports, his former chief strategist Steve Bannon may have tipped the administration’s hand. Bannon speculated on his ‘War Room’ podcast that the immigration force’s presence at TSA security checkpoints was a ‘test run’ ahead of the November midterms. Maybe, Bannon seemed to suggest, it was a rehearsal, meant to test how far the administration can stretch our tolerance for agents as part of the landscape of our daily lives without pushback. … If we can accept the reality that Trump’s personal army is requiring more documentation from us just to board an Airbus, how long until we are forced to tolerate them in our voting booths and beyond?” (03/28/26)
https://theintercept.com/2026/03/28/ice-airports-tsa-fear/
Source: The Dispatch
by Jonah Goldberg
“One of the funniest things about the Trump era is how people have realized how to appeal to Trump’s conception of self-interest. That’s why everyone is giving him awards and gold statues: He’s a sucker for flattery and praise, and he’s incapable of grasping how small it makes him look. Donald Trump has a similar challenge understanding the Iranians because he thinks everyone eventually just wants a ‘deal.’ That assumption worked out for him pretty well — so far — in Venezuela, because the Maduro regime was basically just a bunch of mobsters pretending to be socialists. But the Iranians want different things because they believe different things. And they are willing to watch a lot of the world burn to get them. In fact, they’re willing to light the matches.” (03/27/26)
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/gfile/trump-iran-war-partisanship/
Source: ABC News
“On Friday, Republican Congressman Sam Graves of Missouri became the 36th Republican — and 57th House member — to announce plans not to seek re-election, saying it was time to ‘pass the torch’ to a new generation. In fact, more Republicans are retiring ahead of the midterms than at any point in nearly a century, according to an ABC News tally of retirement announcements and a review of historical data since 1930 compiled by the Brookings Institution. … So far, 21 House Democrats have announced plans to retire, more than the total that left ahead of the 2018 midterms, but fewer than the 29 Democrats who did not run for office again before the party lost the House majority in 2021.” (03/29/26)
https://abcnews.com/Politics/record-number-lawmakers-retiring-congress-ahead-midterms/story?id=131501248
